This is "mostly" on-topic, as I'm trying to get a friend on HECnet. ;)
Last night while putting together a system for a friend, I hit a VAX
networking problem. I wasted hours on it. I go way back with VAXen and
VMS, and have never seen anything like this. I need assistance.
The platform is a MicroVAX 3400 (KA640) with integrated Ethernet, and
a fresh install of VMS 7.3 with DECnet Phase-IV. I did nothing
different on this machine that I haven't done a thousand times before on
various VAXen.
The symptom is that the interface seems to be able to receive, but
not transmit. With LAT enabled, for example, it will see service
availability broadcasts, but it never sends any packets when trying to
establish an outbound connection. The MAC address table on the
(Cisco) switch never gets an entry for that machine.
The only thing that looked weird to me was the Ethernet interface
device names. The template device for the Ethernet interface is ESA0,
and I'd expected for the cloned devices for NETACP and LATACP to have
been ESA1 and ESA2, but they turned out to be ESA3 and ESA4, with no
ESA1 or ESA2 clones in existence. I'm not convinced that it's a
problem, but it seemed odd.
We tried two copies of every piece of hardware: chassis/PS, boards,
cab kits, cables, switch ports on the other end, etc.
I no longer have the system here, but will try to arrange for remote
console access soon.
I've never been so baffled (or frustrated) about a VMS networking
issue. Does anyone have any ideas about this?
Thanks,
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA
I had a bit of a go-around with Comcast over the weekend. The end result is that my addresses have changed. If you are one of my HECnet neighbors, my new addresses are:
IPv4: 73.95.34.4
IPv6: 2601:281:c100:6d0:3870:e9fa:b78e:abd2
These are also always available in DNS as decnet.theberrymans.com.
Mark Berryman
Area 27
