Time for a new release announcement of TCP/IP for RSX-11M-PLUS.
I usually try to avoid spamming lists with release announcements,
and the previous announcement was only a month ago, so I apologize
in advance for the noise.
However, I have a really good reason for this announcement. In the last
few days I identified a bug within RSX, that has been latent for
many years, but which gets activated when TCP/IP is installed.
Because of this, I've cut a new distribution of BQTCP, which now also
includes some patches to RSX, which I really implore everyone to
install.
Highlights:
- Stability and reliability improvements in RSX.
- Improved stability of Multinet.
- Improved stability of MAILD.
Detailed information on things that have been done since the last release:
RSX:
- The MCR REMOVE command have an interaction with the IP: device driver,
which have a bug. Traditionally, the IP: device driver was for the
IP11 device, which I doubt anyone have used in many years, so this
bug have probably been around a long time without detection.
The result of it is that low core and pool will get corrupted when
giving the REMOVE command, and IP: exists.
BQTCP now includes an optional "patch RSX" section in IPGEN, which
will install a new version of MCR on the system. This is only needed
to be run once, as the patching is installing new tasks, and
changing the bootable image to use these new tasks, which is a more
permanent change.
Along with the fix for the memory corruption issues, the new version
of MCR will also fix a few other issues that people might or might
not have noticed. There is some more details in the BQTCP
documentation.
Multinet:
- Some transmit errors should restart the link, but this was not done.
Fixed now.
MAILD:
- Added paging to mail reader.
- Improved remote node system type detection for DECnet.
- Improved the memory layout of MAILD, to avoid some crash situation.
As usual, the distribution is available from:
ftp://mim.update.uu.se/bqtcp.dsk
ftp://mim.update.uu.se/bqtcp.tap
ftp://ftp.update.uu.se/pub/pdp11/rsx/tcpip/tcpip.dsk
The documentation is also available through ftp on Mim, or also at
http://mim.update.uu.se/tcpipdoc
The firewall for Mim have now been removed, so no need for the alternate
ports, but Mim is still listening to the alternate ports as well.
ftp: 10021
telnet: 10023
Johnny
--
Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus
|| on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se || Reading murder books
pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol
I have seen this elsewhere but I see no reference to a fix to the problem
on Multinet. I have a Multinet SSHD agent running and when I attempt to do
a connection the connection does succeed but it can take 90 seconds. I put a
Sniffer on the line and the SSHD agent is attempting to do reverse DNS
lookup on the incoming address. This is normal, but it is doing 6 IPv6
resolution attempts (3 to each of the 2 DNS servers) before it makes the
first IPv4 request. I do not have IPv6 configured on the interface (or any
interface) and I need to find a way to suppress all IPv6 DNS queries( PTR or
AAAA) is here a magic incantation or a logical name that makes this happen?
Dave
Guys. I figure I should try to get a more formalized handling of
connections to HECnet.
With my bridge, it's mostly just people connecting to me, but this is
not a solution that scales very well, so in general I now try to
discourage people from this option. When possible, I prefer to move
people away from it.
Multinet on the other hand scales well. And is possible to use directly
both in VMS and RSX. However, it is silly and inefficient if all
multinet links are to go to me. So I'm thinking about identifying a few
people/places elsewhere in the world, which can be used for connections
where it makes more sense for a somewhat closer point of connection.
So, I would go on dealing with Europe. Might at some point be that we'd
like a second point in the south of Europe, but that is not a high
priority right now.
However, for the US, it would be nice if we could identify a location on
each coast, which have a capable system, and normally is always online,
and which have a good bandwidth, and would be willing to setup
connections to new machines that want to come online.
So, are there any takers? I'll continue to be the first point of contact
when people come asking, but I'd be happy if I could redirect them to
the appropriate person once we have figured out a few basic details.
And then these two persons can work on establishing the actual link.
Johnny
--
Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus
|| on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se || Reading murder books
pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol
On 5/4/18 6:16 PM, Johnny Billquist wrote
>>> I have a candidate... ;-)
>>>
>>> ? Johnny
Johnny - can we ask this person to try a Multinet connection to
45.62.248.66 port 60001 and see if HECnet can be reached?
If running OpenVMS, MULTINET:DECNET-CIRCUITS.COM should contain (needs
editing by hand after MULTINET CONFIGURE /DECNET creates the skeleton
without /TCP):
$ multinet set /decnet /remote=45.62.248.66 /port=60001 /device=tcpa0:
/connect /tcp=connect /buffers=24
I tested it successfully. Others can be added too (on different port
numbers to be assigned).
Thanks,
Supratim
--
Sent via Thunderbird/macOS High Sierra on Lenovo Legion Y720/Windows 10/VirtualBox
The other Johnny wrote:
> Just realized I should maybe make another comment here.
> I don't fully know how Multinet under VMS is managed, or what
> limitations there might be.
> My Multinet compatible implementation under RSX might have some issues
> communicating with VMS nodes, but in general it seems to be working just
> fine.
> The setup under RSX do not really have any problems with dynamic IP
> addresses. But it does introduce a bit of exposure, since when the other
> end has a dynamic address, Multinet will have to be able to accept
> connections from anywhere. I have been pondering whether to enable
> passwords on those links. But until now, it's not been a real problem,
> since people scanning and probing ports have no clue about DECnet over
> IP to start with.
Shameless plug or something here:
I have a program called anftunnel which as the name suggests initially
was used to handle ANF-10 packets. It has grown a bit from that, and
can do other things as well now. Amongst what it can do is:
* Set up a tunnel between two machines, with optional crypto and auth.
The passive (listening) end needs a static address, the other don't.
* Talk to an ethernet interface (via libpcap) and tunnel ethernet frames.
* Terminate a (virtual) sync line and tunnel the frames. Handle TCP and
UDP encapsulated DDCMP lines of the SIMH variety.
* Terminate a MULTINET DECnet-over-IP link. (untested, but given how
simple the encapsulation is...)
* For ANF-10, it can connect an ethernet to a sync line. This requires
slightly molesting the packets involved.
It should be possible to use this to tunnel DECnet/Multinet between two
nodes and keep the Multinet part local to each host.
A slight perversion would be to connect a Multinet link to a DDCMP one...
Source tarball can be found at:
https://www.pdc.kth.se/~bygg/tops/anftunnel.tar
> Johnny
--Johnny (another one of them)
Someone asked a while ago about DECUS software for RSX.
I've now set things up on Mim.
So pretty much all DECUS software can be found at MIM::DECUS:
While I was at it I also decided that I might as well make some of the
DEC software available as well to people on HECnet. So, there is also
MIM::KITS:, which have various layered products I have tape images for.
I would actually suggest people fetch things through TCP/IP and not
DECnet when possible, since TCP/IP is both more efficient, and also
preserves meta information better on transferred files.
(But both ways will work.)
So, have fun installing all kind of stuff. Also, for most things I also
have manuals at http://mim.update.uu.se/manuals
I have some more manuals that I have not scanned yet, and I know that
some of the manuals in there are not really well scanned, and might lack
a page or two. Let me know if you have any issues, and I'll try to help.
Johnny
--
Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus
|| on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se || Reading murder books
pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol
