HECnet

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7 participants
15595 discussions

by bqt＠softjar.se

I got a request from someone. Not anyone I know, and since I don't normally have any VMS systems up and running, I can't really help. I'm sending it on here in case anyone feel generous in helping the guy out... Johnny -------- Forwarded Message -------- Subject: Request for access to a VMS system Date: Tue, 5 May 2020 16:49:12 -0700 From: Steven Schoch <schoch6 at gmail.com> To: Johnny Billquist <bqt at update.uu.se> Hello Johnny, I got your name from Eric Fair when I asked about a VMS system on a group. I long time ago I wrote a module (for an X Windows terminal) that would use a chat script to login to VMS using telnet. I haven't had access to a VMS systems for years, but a user of my script wanted to use it, and said it wouldn't work. So I'd like to troubleshoot it, but I don't have access to a VMS system. Would you be willing to give me temporary access, just long enough to test my login script? Thanks in advance. -- Steve -- 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

5 years, 10 months

FW: More NRT --> VMS and others

by R.Voorhorst＠swabhawat.com

From: R. Voorhorst [mailto:R.Voorhorst at swabhawat.com] Sent: Tuesday, 05 May, 2020 12:04 To: 'owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE' <owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE> Subject: RE: [HECnet] More NRT --> VMS and others Hi Thomas, I use NRT frequently on the older systems as CTERM does not work well with them; often bursty IO. On VAX/VMS, NRT usually works well, at least as host and cooperates well with Tops10/Tops20 Panda. Also on Rsx11M and Rsts 10.1. Sethost on Tops20 Panda to VMS however does not: sethost Escape character(^Y): Host name: swbv89 ? Communication with VMS not supported by SETHOST Even on OpenVms alpha 8.3 it works to vax, however with connection to tops10/20, the process crashes with an exception. Maybe it could be repaired on Alpha, but I doubt sufficient sources are around. You can test initial connect on Swbv55 on hecnet when it is up, as it is a VAX VMS 7.3 hecnet area router, though you cannot login on it (yet?). Best regards, R.V. From: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE <mailto:owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE> [mailto:owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE] On Behalf Of Thomas DeBellis Sent: Tuesday, 05 May, 2020 07:14 To: hecnet at Update.UU.SE <mailto:hecnet at Update.UU.SE> Subject: [HECnet] More NRT What's fun about the Tops-20 NRT client (SETHOST) is that it doesn't do much aside from parsing for an escape character and node name. It builds a connection string and checks to make sure the remote system is either a 10 or a 20. Then it twiddles a few things on the terminal (a few more if you're running my changes to handle page mode). Finally, and this is the cool part, it issues an MTOPR% to directly connect the local user's terminal to the open DECnet connection (port 23). Thereafter, the client does nothing until the interrupt character is typed or the connection is broken. So response can be pretty snappy because you are never running in user space; no context switching. The CTERM client on the other hand is reading and writing data and otherwise handling the specifics of the protocol in user space. So, more overhead and more context switching. As an experiment, I removed the checks for Tops-10 and Tops-20 and tried connecting to a few hosts on HECnet. * Tops-20; TOMMYT and TWENEX worked (of course) * Tops-10; VENTI worked * RSX-11+; MIM accepted the connection and broke it as soon as I started typing. * VMS; LEGATO accepted the connection and broke it as soon as I started typing. * RSTS; TRON accepted the connection and then did nothing. It never broke the connection, but never displayed any banner or anything else. It appeared hung. So it would appear that NRT servers only exist on the 36 bit line. Perhaps it's possible to configure the service for other platforms? The first few RSTS systems I tried didn't appear to be online; MEZZO, PLUTO, RSTSE and BITXOT. The few Windows systems I checked didn't appear to be online, either; WXP, MISSY, KIBBEH and WATAN. I'm not sure if that means they refused the connection attempt outright.

5 years, 10 months

HECnet map

by paulkoning＠comcast.net

Gentlepeople, I've added a map maker to PyDECnet, which is now on-line on HECnet. It currently refreshes once every 24 hours, showing locations and paths between the locations. You can hover over the location markers to see nodes that have been recently observed, or click on the markers to see all nodes whether observed or not. Clicking on the connecting arcs will tell you which nodes have connections on that path. The map is here: http://akdesign.dyndns.org:8080/map You can also see a tabular display of the data collected by the network scanner, at http://akdesign.dyndns.org:8080/map/data . Right now that link isn't shown, I'll add that. Feedback would be welcome. There is no map legend yet. The button on the upper right is the "layers" tool that lets you chose among a number of map sources, and lets you turn the location and/or path information on or off. The default map is OpenStreetMap, and the mapping interface machinery is the Leaflet package, a very nice and easy to use tool. paul

5 years, 10 months

I'm not sure Paul got my email about locations...

by roll＠stupi.com

Spam Filter? >> *Subject: *Area 59... >> >> DIMMA is at Update in Uppsala >> >> STUPI R29GWA SOL at Stockholm >> 59?19'03.2"N 18?01'24.1"E, 59.317551, 18.023352 >> KRYLBO and 59.3 HOBBYH at Charlottesville, VA >> 38?09'10.9"N 78?33'26.3"W, 38.153026, -78.557299 You can park all other area 59 nodes at the Stockholm address. --Peter

5 years, 10 months

Proxy to VMS?

by paulkoning＠comcast.net

I've run into a glitch with the map maker, which wants to make NICE connections to other nodes without authentication information. Depending on the OS, there is a notion of "default account" or "proxy", and I expected that to work when I send the connect request off without any username/password content. Apparently that's wrong for VMS, and I very vaguely remember this but not what to do about it. On VMS, how can you set up a network object to allow access without a password? If you do this, what is required in the connect request coming in? paul

5 years, 10 months

Announcing TCP/IP for RSX-11M-PLUS

by bqt＠softjar.se

Time for a new release announcement of TCP/IP for RSX-11M-PLUS. Highlights: . IP multicasting have been implemented . TCP stability improvements Detailed information on things that have been done since the last release: IP: . Added IP multicast support, and functions to enable this on UDP sockets. UDP: . Added functions for joining and leaving multicast groups on sockets. TCP: . Bugfix in TCP. Under some circumstances, TCP will stop receiving data because of a calculation error on TCP sequence numbers. . Improvement in TCP. Code accidentally sent unnecessary probes when a socket is in Close Wait. . Bugfix in TCP. Any ICMP error received for a socket caused the TCP connection to close down. This should not happen for ICMP source quench or ICMP timeout messages. . Correct MSS computation and setup based on interface MTU. IFCONFIG: . Added ability to change MTU of interface in IFCONFIG. FTPD: . Bugfix in FTPD. Long home directory names caused FTPD to fail. Some additional notes: Some people might wonder why the multicast changes have been introduced, but no other changes related to it. I wanted to get this change out now in order to allow people the possibility to play with it, if anyone is interested. For my own part, I next plan to look at mDNS, to allow RSX to live in home networks without a proper DNS server, but still be visible to other systems. mDNS depends on multicast groups. In addition, the TCP corrections finally fixed some long standing problems that I have been observing that have been very rare, but very annoying to me. BQTCP is now behaving very well on the network, and I do not actually have any known issues (at this time) that that are nagging me. I hope this release will see a further reduction on work on protocols like IP, TCP and UDP, and future work will be even more focused on higher level protocols. 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 I hope people find this update useful. 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

5 years, 10 months

VMS/RSX Guest accounts --> 2020 memory extension

by R.Voorhorst＠swabhawat.com

L.S. The memory extension from 1 --> 2-->4 MW are quite easy to implement within the 2020 KS10 architecture, few extra mapping bits in the CPU and Unibus maps are all that is needed. Though in current hardware maybe a bit difficult: 2 more bits in the UBA rams, etc. in Simh it is easy to do. As Tops10 was developed onto KL10 and modified for KS10, the real limits of Tops10 was really the 4 MW barrier i.e. 13 bits versus 11 bits. The KS10 modifications were relatively simple to adapt to larger sizes, BOOT inclusive. R.V. -----Original Message----- From: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE [mailto:owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE] On Behalf Of Dave McGuire Sent: Wednesday, 29 April, 2020 19:58 To: hecnet at Update.UU.SE Subject: Re: [HECnet] VMS/RSX Guest accounts On 4/28/20 11:51 PM, Thomas DeBellis wrote: > You know, I have been racking my brains from time to time and I can't > remember a thing about the ADP modifications to the 2020. I myself know very little about the specifics. (I'm mainly an -8, -11, and VAX guy) I would guess Peter Lothberg knows quite a lot about it. > Did you pick up any software with these little jewels? The monitor > changes might be interesting. No software, unfortunately. Just the iron. BTW, one of our museum folk is working on the 36-bit quote swag now. -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA

5 years, 10 months

VMS/RSX Guest accounts --> 2020 Unibus(ses) --> Tops20 V4/5

by R.Voorhorst＠swabhawat.com

L.S. By the way, I am pretty sure MRC attempted his variant of Tops20 (4.2? and 5.x?) on the 512 kB KS10 variant; the results might have turned out differently if he had a 1 MW variant available. Is this work preserved somewhere? R.V. -----Original Message----- From: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE [mailto:owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE] On Behalf Of R. Voorhorst Sent: Wednesday, 29 April, 2020 08:51 To: hecnet at Update.UU.SE Subject: RE: [HECnet] VMS/RSX Guest accounts --> 2020 Unibus(ses) L.S. Well, look in Tops10 monitor sources and in the engineering stuff: multiple Unibus adapters (up to 4, standard 2 provided) each which its own mapping hardware and registers. It can easily expanded to even handle 4 MW memory space (I run here some 2 MW variants), but the current Tops10 single section monitor cannot handle the needed page mapping in monitor mapping space very well. 1 MW works fine though. 1 MW variants surfaced somewhat later than the 512k ones. R.V. -----Original Message----- From: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE [mailto:owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE] On Behalf Of Johnny Billquist Sent: Wednesday, 29 April, 2020 08:14 To: hecnet at Update.UU.SE Subject: Re: [HECnet] VMS/RSX Guest accounts I should point out that I actually suspect the 2020 have a Unibus map, just as the big PDP-11s or any VAXen have. Which then remaps the Unibus address space to the larger address space of the machine, so that DMA can go anywhere. Johnny On 2020-04-29 08:10, Johnny Billquist wrote: > Nope. Unibus can only address 128Kword, and in this context that is > 128K of 18-bit words. So you cannot even DMA into a full 256K of 36 bit words. > > Johnny > > On 2020-04-29 05:51, Thomas DeBellis wrote: >> You know, I have been racking my brains from time to time and I can't >> remember a thing about the ADP modifications to the 2020. >> >> So, the 2020 came with a maximum of 512K words, 2**9. An addition >> bit would have brought it up to a full megaword, 2**10, which is >> quite reasonable for the target audience (some kind of installation >> that didn't hold stock in the local power utility). >> >> I guess there may have been modifications to the 2020 build of the >> monitor to allow for the extra bit. I don't know if the Unibus >> devices could do DMA into the full address space. >> >> Did you pick up any software with these little jewels? The monitor >> changes might be interesting. >> >>> -------------------------------------------------------------------- >>> ---- On 4/24/20 12:12 AM, Dave McGuire wrote: >>> Nice! >>> >>> One of our 2020s is in the brown color scheme. You know what >>> that >>> means: ADP, and one more address bit. >>>> ------------------------------------------------------------------- >>>> ----- >>>> >>>> On 4/23/20 6:15 PM, Thomas DeBellis wrote: >>>> >>>> The solution for 4.1 was one of the finest hacks I have ever heard >>>> of; while the 2020 doesn't support extended addressing, it does >>>> support multiple address spaces, so what they did was move all the >>>> symbols into a separate address space. This was called 'hiding' >>>> symbols and I thought it was great because it made them harder to >>>> smash. However, all of that went out the window with 5.0, which >>>> fully supported extended addressing. > -- 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

5 years, 10 months

VMS/RSX Guest accounts

by tommytimesharing＠gmail.com

I've had my fill of FAL and DAP for the moment and have turned to some other things as sort of a 'break'.? The Tops-10 NFT client breaks on certain file names that the 20 sends it, so there is going to be some debugging to track that down.? Fortunately, a very patient person gave me PPN on one of their 10's. Right now, I'm working on bringing the Tops-20 mail system a bit more up to date with respect to DECnet communications.? These were largely put aside when full Internet connectivity happened. Still, the PANDA distribution has some bit rot because I know that certain Columbia changes for DECnet (to support CCnet) are not there.? I can't imagine that we didn't send them to MRC; that would have been unthinkable. Fortunately, I was able to remember enough to put some of them back so that I got SMTP over DECnet working well, again.? It had been suffering from about two minute timing delays and now it's instantaneous between 20's, like I remember.?? Oddly enough, I don't remember what else ran SMTP over DECnet; I'm certain that RSX and VMS could have done it.? I think some VMS site might have. However, most non-SMTP DECnet hosts on CCnet were running Mail-11, which the 20 also groks.? In fact, it can convert Mail-11 addresses to SMTP and route over other transports such as PUP, Chaos and TCP/IP as well as DECnet.? We did a lot of mail routing for CCnet to the Internet on CU20B, back in the day. Unfortunately, there is some bit rot in some of the Tops-20 Mail-11 code, so I've got some tinkering to do.? Does anyone have a VMS or RSX system that they'd care to give me a guest account on?? It doesn't need any special capabilities; I'm just going to be sending mail and looking a few raw headers over.

5 years, 10 months

VMS/RSX Guest accounts --> 2020 Unibus(ses)

by R.Voorhorst＠swabhawat.com

L.S. Well, look in Tops10 monitor sources and in the engineering stuff: multiple Unibus adapters (up to 4, standard 2 provided) each which its own mapping hardware and registers. It can easily expanded to even handle 4 MW memory space (I run here some 2 MW variants), but the current Tops10 single section monitor cannot handle the needed page mapping in monitor mapping space very well. 1 MW works fine though. 1 MW variants surfaced somewhat later than the 512k ones. R.V. -----Original Message----- From: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE [mailto:owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE] On Behalf Of Johnny Billquist Sent: Wednesday, 29 April, 2020 08:14 To: hecnet at Update.UU.SE Subject: Re: [HECnet] VMS/RSX Guest accounts I should point out that I actually suspect the 2020 have a Unibus map, just as the big PDP-11s or any VAXen have. Which then remaps the Unibus address space to the larger address space of the machine, so that DMA can go anywhere. Johnny On 2020-04-29 08:10, Johnny Billquist wrote: > Nope. Unibus can only address 128Kword, and in this context that is > 128K of 18-bit words. So you cannot even DMA into a full 256K of 36 bit words. > > Johnny > > On 2020-04-29 05:51, Thomas DeBellis wrote: >> You know, I have been racking my brains from time to time and I can't >> remember a thing about the ADP modifications to the 2020. >> >> So, the 2020 came with a maximum of 512K words, 2**9. An addition >> bit would have brought it up to a full megaword, 2**10, which is >> quite reasonable for the target audience (some kind of installation >> that didn't hold stock in the local power utility). >> >> I guess there may have been modifications to the 2020 build of the >> monitor to allow for the extra bit. I don't know if the Unibus >> devices could do DMA into the full address space. >> >> Did you pick up any software with these little jewels? The monitor >> changes might be interesting. >> >>> -------------------------------------------------------------------- >>> ---- On 4/24/20 12:12 AM, Dave McGuire wrote: >>> Nice! >>> >>> One of our 2020s is in the brown color scheme. You know what >>> that >>> means: ADP, and one more address bit. >>>> ------------------------------------------------------------------- >>>> ----- >>>> >>>> On 4/23/20 6:15 PM, Thomas DeBellis wrote: >>>> >>>> The solution for 4.1 was one of the finest hacks I have ever heard >>>> of; while the 2020 doesn't support extended addressing, it does >>>> support multiple address spaces, so what they did was move all the >>>> symbols into a separate address space. This was called 'hiding' >>>> symbols and I thought it was great because it made them harder to >>>> smash. However, all of that went out the window with 5.0, which >>>> fully supported extended addressing. > -- 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

5 years, 10 months

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