If we really get stuck with this I am my own ISP and can probably make
something work. I pay for a certain amount of bandwidth, but the
addresses (all static) are mine to assign and manage. I have no
practical limitations to the number of domains they represent.
Current domains pointing to my address space (that may be of use in this
context) are:
69.21.253.228
decvax.net - alias for vmsnet.org (at the moment anyway)
vmsnet.org - currently a NetBSD front-end system to a VAX cluster. Soon
it will be a VMS cluster of Alpha's and VAXen
69.21.253.229
pdp-11.net - currently a NetBSD front-end system to a PDP-11 group of
systems (don't ask it's ugly to say the least)
69.21.253.230
declab.net - intended to point to the SMDnet backbone (when I have more
time to deal with this)
declab.org - intended to point to the HECnet backbone (when I have more
time to deal with this)
-Steve
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE [mailto:owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE] On
Behalf Of Bob Armstrong
Sent: Thursday, October 22, 2009 10:50
To: hecnet at Update.UU.SE
Subject: [HECnet] hecnet.eu and decnet.org domains
Sampsa Laine wrote:
Suggestion: If we include external IP addresses for any nodes that
have them in those data files we discussed yesterday, could we
populate the DNS with these (i.e. chimpy.hecnet.eu points at CHIMPY's
external IP address)?
Looks like Mark has run into a few snags with his registrar for the
hecnet.eu domain, but nothing fatal and it should get straightened out
in a
few days. In the meantime I noticed that the decnet.org domain was also
available - seemed like a shame to just leave it lying around for anyone
to
get, so I registered that one. I don't know if I'll actually end up
doing
anything with it or if I'll just give it up in a year, but in the
meantime
it's available for any good use we can think of.
If your machine is directly connected to the Internet and you want a
third
level DNS record for "node.decnet.org", send me an email with the name
and
IP and/or FQDN and I'll add an A or CNAME record as you like. AFAIK my
ISP
doesn't have any official limit on the number of DNS records that
they'll
permit per domain, so we can test that policy :-)
It'd be nice if all the various documents and status displays
associated
with HECnet were all accessible from a single web page, but I have
absolutely zero desire to be a webmaster. If somebody wants to
volunteer to
host a web page for HECnet let me know and I'll be happy to point the
www.decnet.org entry that way. You don't have to actually host all the
various documents and scripts, of course - just maintain a page with
links
to them.
Bob
Sampsa Laine wrote:
Suggestion: If we include external IP addresses for any nodes that
have them in those data files we discussed yesterday, could we
populate the DNS with these (i.e. chimpy.hecnet.eu points at CHIMPY's
external IP address)?
Looks like Mark has run into a few snags with his registrar for the
hecnet.eu domain, but nothing fatal and it should get straightened out in a
few days. In the meantime I noticed that the decnet.org domain was also
available - seemed like a shame to just leave it lying around for anyone to
get, so I registered that one. I don't know if I'll actually end up doing
anything with it or if I'll just give it up in a year, but in the meantime
it's available for any good use we can think of.
If your machine is directly connected to the Internet and you want a third
level DNS record for "node.decnet.org", send me an email with the name and
IP and/or FQDN and I'll add an A or CNAME record as you like. AFAIK my ISP
doesn't have any official limit on the number of DNS records that they'll
permit per domain, so we can test that policy :-)
It'd be nice if all the various documents and status displays associated
with HECnet were all accessible from a single web page, but I have
absolutely zero desire to be a webmaster. If somebody wants to volunteer to
host a web page for HECnet let me know and I'll be happy to point the
www.decnet.org entry that way. You don't have to actually host all the
various documents and scripts, of course - just maintain a page with links
to them.
Bob
On (10:22 21/10/09), Sampsa Laine wrote:
I'm starting to get concerned that HECnet is almost running TOO well,
i.e. there's not much left to tweak :)
Where should we go from here? Setting up our own virtual X.25 PSDN
tunnelled over IP maybe? Something crazy with SNA?
An ISO TP4 / DECnet Phase V network with IS-IS routing would be very cool,
and support Hobbyist licensed X.400 mail and X.500 directory services,
terminal sessions via VT and file transfer via FTAM. And with a bit of
poking the last free Isode (ISO Development Environment) release - v8.0.2
IIRC - might be made to work on NetBSD.
SNA would be very cool too.
Cheers,
Andrew
--
Andrew Back
a at smokebelch.org
Hi,
just one humble little detail, thus a direct mail and not to the list... (Sorry I'm some days after in reading/commenting this storm of messages)
Once upon time, right about the time when those computers we are now "playing" with were new, there was US-ASCII, a 7 bit character encoding scheme, representing, amongst others, the 26 characters used in English writing. But in other countries, like here in Sweden, we use some other number of characters in our alpabet - swedish uses 29 letters, russian uses 33, for example.
So, a "local code" was develped, where some few of the rarely used tokens of the US-ASCII-scheme was instead used for those extra 6 letters (lower and upper case of 3 letters).
This was set in the ISO 646 standard, set 1975/12/01 - locally named SEN 85 02 00 Annex B
Here those letters are represented as:
0x7d }
0x7b {
0x7c |
0x5d ]
0x5b [
0x5c \
So, if I'm writing my given name (G ran) in that 7-bit coding, as we often do in those old systems, I'll write it G|ran. In an old system (might be old version RSX, might be RT-11 or migt be TOPS-10), I'd have to use that format.
These extra letters are quite common in daily writing and in names as they are wowels. I guess that the system descriptions you are trying to find a suitable format to encode most likely will contain names of owner/manager/..., end eventually also a city name as location. There are several citys inside Sweden containing these tokens (like \rebro, \regrund, \rkelljunga, G|teborg, Malm|, V}nersborg, Lax{, ...), not to mention several popular personal and family-names
Besides, there is an extra "tweak" to this.
If i write these letters in "DEC Multinational", almost identical (in this respect) to ISO-LATIN-1, but strip the 8:th bit (not uncommon, try a VT-100 terminal or equivalent "telnet" 7-bit "of the shelf"!), You would end up with getting edvEDV.
In those old dyas, the department secratary quite easilly managed to sort out post (from SUN microsystems) sent to mr. Gveran Eheling (my name is G ran hling), even though my dep. used DEC computers, that had working 8-bit...
So, to end up this E-mail:
Would possibly the : or the ; be a better separator than the | , as I really think these characters are more rarely used than the pipe!
An alternative might be the #
All my best,
G ran hling .EQ. G|ran ]hling .EQ. Goeran AAhling .NE. Goran Ahling
(Missconfigured printer might even print it as Gveran Ehling, but is it still NOT Goran Ahling, that would be another given name and another family name).
Sampsa Laine wrote:
Why? What would that accomplish that the pipe separated format doesn't except make things uglier? The reason I chose the pipe symbol is because this way we don't have to quote strings as people very seldomly use pipe symbols, but do use commas all the time...
On 21 Oct 2009, at 02:15, Steve Davidson wrote:
Let's try this again...
Any chance this could be in comma separated format? Put strings in
quotes if necessary.
-Steve
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE [mailto:owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE] On
Behalf Of Sampsa Laine
Sent: Tuesday, October 20, 2009 19:43
To: hecnet at Update.UU.SE
Subject: Re: [HECnet] HECnet crawler and INFO.TXT
I've updated CHIMPY in the same format.
Sampsa
On 21 Oct 2009, at 00:26, Bob Armstrong wrote:
I took Sampsa's suggestion and put an INFO.TXT on CODA with a
machine
readable section at the end that contains information about the
local nodes.
I already wrote a little DCL script that crawls the HECnet and
collects all
the INFO.TXT files that it can find (so far there are eight,
counting mine)
and if enough people adopt this format I'll write another little
script to
parse out the node information.
The format is pretty straight forward - you can just type out
CODA::INFO.TXT and see for yourself.
Bob
Bob
The hecnet.eu mx record now points to your mail.jfcl.com dns entry.
Have fun!
Regards, Mark.
On Tue, 2009-10-20 at 11:59 -0700, Bob Armstrong wrote:
Mark -
You can put in an MX record for *.mail11.hecnet.eu that points to
mail.jfcl.com if you want. I have no objection, but if you do be sure to
let me know so that I can configure my SMTP server to accept mail for that
domain (otherwise you'll get "550 Relay not allowed...").
If you want to host my DCN Node List on that site it'd be nice. Just give
me a place to put it and a way to upload updates.
Bob
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE [mailto:owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE] On Behalf
Of Mark Wickens
Sent: Tuesday, October 20, 2009 11:42 AM
To: hecnet at Update.UU.SE
Subject: [HECnet] Domain registration hecnet.eu
Guys,
I've just registered hecnet.eu - should be sorted within 24 hours.
So, if we can agree amongst ourselves the best way forward with a mail
gateway then I can point mail.hecnet.eu (or some variant) to the
designated gateway.
I'm going to create a website under www.hecnet.eu - this will be a
community effort between us all I'm anticipating, so how would you like
to go forward - it'll be hosted on the newly acquired vaxstation
4000/VLC under WASD ideally, and what I'd like to do is open it up so
that people can edit files directly via hecnet to add their bit. Is that
an agreeable course of action?
Regards, Mark.
--
Fred wrote:
I thought SNA mostly ran on Token Ring or something?
I have an IBM PS/2 model (something) with both an MCA Token Ring card and and MCA Ethernet - and I even have a passive Token Ring Mau! (and a cable, somewhere ...)
There were also MCA cards for making a PS/2 emulate a SNA-connected terminal over coax. And, BTW, all MAUs are passive. The active device is called a CAU. *shrug*
Now if I could just find that gateway software. When I had access to a real mainframe, all of the PC's went through a handful of these PS/2's via Ethernet, and the PS/2's had token ring cards in them connected to a real FEP.
Cisco and Madge actually sold a significant number of devices for doing precisely this, back in the day.
Peace... Sridhar
Fred wrote:
On Wed, 21 Oct 2009, Sampsa Laine wrote:
Where should we go from here? Setting up our own virtual X.25 PSDN tunnelled over IP maybe? Something crazy with SNA?
SNA! SNA! :)
I could set up Hercules here running MVS 3.8J ... ;) I'm sure the folks have been able to get SNA to work within the emulator. I set up Hercules and MVS once, but other than a novelty, I really didn't do much with it, because most of my associates wouldn't know a mainframe if it ran them over. I think it would be interesting to get something quasi-public (on HECmet) going.
Plus, I have real IBM mainframe iron.
Peace... Sridhar
Brian Hechinger wrote:
* DECnet for BSD, especially 2.11 PDP-11 bsd. Yes, a 16 bit version is
significantly harder than a 32 bit version, I know, but there are several
real PDP11s out there running BSD that could be on HECnet. I know - I've
got one! We could use the Linux DECnet as a starting point - the dn
userspace utility programs might not even be that hard to port - but we'd
need a kernel wizard to do the tricky bits :-)
I know just the guy. If you are serious about this, please let me know and
I'll see if he's interested in helping out. I think the last time I talked
to him he mentioned about lacking an ethernet controller for his PDP-11.
Anyway, he's a professor for the university I work at. PhD in Neurology of
all things, but he's one hell of a programmer. He wrote kernel patches for
BSD 2.11 (i think, it might have been 2.09) for the PDP-11/73 CPU which it
seems had a bug in it that DEC had patched all their OSes to work around.
Smart cat. Don't know how interested he'd be though. I can always ask.
As usual, it's all about time. I've done a number of patches and small fixes in the kernel of 2.11BSD myself. It's not that magic.
But it requires time, and first of all, you need to have a fairly good understanding of DECnet, which will take some reading, and talking with people. Then you can start thinking about how the API should look like. The concepts in DECnet are slightly different than TCP/IP for instance, so you cannot have an API that looks like the TCP/IP one here, but need to do something else. I suspect it might be a good idea to look how the interface in Ultrix looks like, and try to model it after that.
Johnny
* DECnet for BSD, especially 2.11 PDP-11 bsd. Yes, a 16 bit version is
significantly harder than a 32 bit version, I know, but there are several
real PDP11s out there running BSD that could be on HECnet. I know - I've
got one! We could use the Linux DECnet as a starting point - the dn
userspace utility programs might not even be that hard to port - but we'd
need a kernel wizard to do the tricky bits :-)
I know just the guy. If you are serious about this, please let me know and
I'll see if he's interested in helping out. I think the last time I talked
to him he mentioned about lacking an ethernet controller for his PDP-11.
Anyway, he's a professor for the university I work at. PhD in Neurology of
all things, but he's one hell of a programmer. He wrote kernel patches for
BSD 2.11 (i think, it might have been 2.09) for the PDP-11/73 CPU which it
seems had a bug in it that DEC had patched all their OSes to work around.
Smart cat. Don't know how interested he'd be though. I can always ask.
-brian
--
"Coding in C is like sending a 3 year old to do groceries. You gotta
tell them exactly what you want or you'll end up with a cupboard full of
pop tarts and pancake mix." -- IRC User (http://www.bash.org/?841435)
On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 10:26:43AM -0400, Fred wrote:
I thought SNA mostly ran on Token Ring or something?
I have an IBM PS/2 model (something) with both an MCA Token Ring card and
and MCA Ethernet - and I even have a passive Token Ring Mau! (and a cable,
somewhere ...)
Do you need/want a cisco 4500 router and some token ring interfaces? Got
more token ring cards for the 4000 series cisco routers than I know what
to do with. Ok, granted 1 is more than I know what to do with, but I've
got more than that. :)
-brian
--
"Coding in C is like sending a 3 year old to do groceries. You gotta
tell them exactly what you want or you'll end up with a cupboard full of
pop tarts and pancake mix." -- IRC User (http://www.bash.org/?841435)
I can take a look at imaging it. It is RX50 format. I do have a complete set of "orange" binders with updates. I seem to remember that it is four (4) 3-inch binders, but I'll have to check.
-Steve
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE on behalf of Zane H. Healy
Sent: Wed 10/21/2009 10:41
To: hecnet at Update.UU.SE
Subject: RE: [HECnet] Next retro comms project?
At 10:07 AM -0400 10/21/09, Steve Davidson wrote:
I have a DECnet kit for RT-11. From what I remember it is HUGE!
It can not make use of I/D space so at one point RT Engineering stopped
development on it. When I joined the RT group in 1984 I was supposed to
work on DECnet but within a week of me joining they cancelled the project.
I had a hard time understanding why a company that billed itself as
a network connected company would ever cancel such a product! I
wound up doing user-mode utilities and SPR's instead. Yuch!
Any chance you can image the kit and make it available? If it's that
old it's covered by the Supnik license. Do you have documentation?
As I just mentioned in a post, I've been looking for this for years!
Zane
--
| Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator |
| healyzh at aracnet.com (primary) | OpenVMS Enthusiast |
| MONK::HEALYZH (DECnet) | Classic Computer Collector |
+----------------------------------+----------------------------+
| Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing, |
| PDP-10 Emulation and Zane's Computer Museum. |
| http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/ |
Bob Armstrong wrote:
re: 2.11bsd DECnet
Performance will be horrible, and it will also probably be very problematic
Not clear whether you mean that in general, or just about the entirely
userspace version.
I don't think a completely user space DECnet implementation is even
possible on a PDP-11 but I don't see why a kernel-integrated version
couldn't be done. 2.11bsd already has TCP/IP networking that works
perfectly well. It's not super fast, but then a PDP-11 (at least if we're
talking about real ones) isn't a super fast machine either. The TCP/IP
speed is on a par with the performance of the rest of the system. We'd
probably have to replace the TCP/IP networking in the kernel with DECnet
because of address space limitations, so it'd be a kernel build choice for
either TCP/IP networking OR DECnet, but I think most people could live with
that.
Well, the TCP/IP for 2.11BSD is all in kernel space...
And the ping times for my TCP/IP under RSX is better than 2.11, if I remember my test right. :-)
No need to replace it. Just add DECnet in parallel.
Johnny
At 10:07 AM -0400 10/21/09, Steve Davidson wrote:
I have a DECnet kit for RT-11. From what I remember it is HUGE!
It can not make use of I/D space so at one point RT Engineering stopped
development on it. When I joined the RT group in 1984 I was supposed to
work on DECnet but within a week of me joining they cancelled the project.
I had a hard time understanding why a company that billed itself as a network connected company would ever cancel such a product! I wound up doing user-mode utilities and SPR's instead. Yuch!
Any chance you can image the kit and make it available? If it's that old it's covered by the Supnik license. Do you have documentation?
As I just mentioned in a post, I've been looking for this for years!
Zane
--
| Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator |
| healyzh at aracnet.com (primary) | OpenVMS Enthusiast |
| MONK::HEALYZH (DECnet) | Classic Computer Collector |
+----------------------------------+----------------------------+
| Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing, |
| PDP-10 Emulation and Zane's Computer Museum. |
| http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/ |
This runs over serial (DL, X.25, etc) or parallel links (DR something). So no Ethernet hardware. It predates that by quite a while. Marty Gentry wrote the Ethernet hardware handler (driver) but it was never used for DECnet. DECnet was cancelled right after he finished it.
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE on behalf of Zane H. Healy
Sent: Wed 10/21/2009 10:36
To: hecnet at Update.UU.SE
Subject: RE: [HECnet] Next retro comms project?
At 6:55 AM -0700 10/21/09, Bob Armstrong wrote:
* DECnet for RT11. This is easier at least, because DEC actually sold
such a product, but I don't know if actual kits and documentation for it
still exists. In either case, I've got PDP-11s and PDP-8s that could be on
HECnet if they had networking software.
As many know finding a copy of this has been a goal I've had for a
*LONG* time. I know of one person that might a copy, but last I
heard, couldn't get to where the floppies were and didn't have time.
Keep in mind this doesn't run over Ethernet.
Zane
--
| Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator |
| healyzh at aracnet.com (primary) | OpenVMS Enthusiast |
| MONK::HEALYZH (DECnet) | Classic Computer Collector |
+----------------------------------+----------------------------+
| Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing, |
| PDP-10 Emulation and Zane's Computer Museum. |
| http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/ |
re: 2.11bsd DECnet
Performance will be horrible, and it will also probably be very problematic
Not clear whether you mean that in general, or just about the entirely
userspace version.
I don't think a completely user space DECnet implementation is even
possible on a PDP-11 but I don't see why a kernel-integrated version
couldn't be done. 2.11bsd already has TCP/IP networking that works
perfectly well. It's not super fast, but then a PDP-11 (at least if we're
talking about real ones) isn't a super fast machine either. The TCP/IP
speed is on a par with the performance of the rest of the system. We'd
probably have to replace the TCP/IP networking in the kernel with DECnet
because of address space limitations, so it'd be a kernel build choice for
either TCP/IP networking OR DECnet, but I think most people could live with
that.
Bob
I forgot about the SNA product for Windows NT 3.51/4.0. I have a couple of those kits hanging around. I don't have the SNA hardware but I do have the software.
Any takers? I certainly don't need them?
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE on behalf of Jason Stevens
Sent: Wed 10/21/2009 10:33
To: hecnet at update.uu.se
Subject: Re: [HECnet] Next retro comms project?
Microsoft SNA server works pretty well for that, and it's easy to find...
Many moons ago I had TONNES of machines setup in that kind of manner, with
type 1 token ring to boot! (4mbit).
Even with Windows NT 3.51 & 4.0 it worked surprisingly well. (SNA Server 2.x
was waaay better then 3.x & 4.x IMHO). Anyways it was easy to connect the
tokenring to the FEP, but later on we got cisco routers that would do
translational bridging and local ack so we moved our SNA servers to
ethernet only.. Just remember to flip the bits of the FEP address as the
endian is different from ethernet to tokenring.
I've also done the netware SNA gateway, but it was living hell to setup... I
doubt I could get it to work again...
On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 10:26 AM, Fred <fcoffey at thrifty.misernet.net> wrote:
On Wed, 21 Oct 2009, Sampsa Laine wrote:
I thought SNA mostly ran on Token Ring or something?
I have an IBM PS/2 model (something) with both an MCA Token Ring card and
and MCA Ethernet - and I even have a passive Token Ring Mau! (and a cable,
somewhere ...)
Now if I could just find that gateway software. When I had access to a
real mainframe, all of the PC's went through a handful of these PS/2's via
Ethernet, and the PS/2's had token ring cards in them connected to a real
FEP.
Fred
At 6:55 AM -0700 10/21/09, Bob Armstrong wrote:
* DECnet for RT11. This is easier at least, because DEC actually sold
such a product, but I don't know if actual kits and documentation for it
still exists. In either case, I've got PDP-11s and PDP-8s that could be on
HECnet if they had networking software.
As many know finding a copy of this has been a goal I've had for a *LONG* time. I know of one person that might a copy, but last I heard, couldn't get to where the floppies were and didn't have time. Keep in mind this doesn't run over Ethernet.
Zane
--
| Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator |
| healyzh at aracnet.com (primary) | OpenVMS Enthusiast |
| MONK::HEALYZH (DECnet) | Classic Computer Collector |
+----------------------------------+----------------------------+
| Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing, |
| PDP-10 Emulation and Zane's Computer Museum. |
| http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/ |
At 2:41 PM +0100 10/21/09, Sampsa Laine wrote:
Old-school (68K) Macs: I don't know where I got this idea but I think there might be a PATHWORKS client for classic Macs? Anybody ever use it?
I think there was a *VERY* old client. Plus the company that did classic Samba support also did DECnet support, IIRC. For many years I ran the Appletalk server on my Alpha. I had to give that up so I could move to OpenVMS v8.3 and Mac OS X 10.4.x. :-( I *REALLY* miss the classic Appletalk support, as it worked *REALLY* well.
Zane
--
| Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator |
| healyzh at aracnet.com (primary) | OpenVMS Enthusiast |
| MONK::HEALYZH (DECnet) | Classic Computer Collector |
+----------------------------------+----------------------------+
| Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing, |
| PDP-10 Emulation and Zane's Computer Museum. |
| http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/ |
Microsoft SNA server works pretty well for that, and it's easy to find...
Many moons ago I had TONNES of machines setup in that kind of manner, with type 1 token ring to boot! (4mbit).
Even with Windows NT 3.51 & 4.0 it worked surprisingly well. (SNA Server 2.x was waaay better then 3.x & 4.x IMHO). Anyways it was easy to connect the tokenring to the FEP, but later on we got cisco routers that would do translational bridging and local ack so we moved our SNA servers to ethernet only.. Just remember to flip the bits of the FEP address as the endian is different from ethernet to tokenring.
I've also done the netware SNA gateway, but it was living hell to setup... I doubt I could get it to work again...
On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 10:26 AM, Fred <fcoffey at thrifty.misernet.net> wrote:
On Wed, 21 Oct 2009, Sampsa Laine wrote:
I thought SNA mostly ran on Token Ring or something?
I have an IBM PS/2 model (something) with both an MCA Token Ring card and and MCA Ethernet - and I even have a passive Token Ring Mau! (and a cable, somewhere ...)
Now if I could just find that gateway software. When I had access to a real mainframe, all of the PC's went through a handful of these PS/2's via Ethernet, and the PS/2's had token ring cards in them connected to a real FEP.
Fred
I'm not ready to part with it just yet. Sorry...
-Steve
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE on behalf of Jason Stevens
Sent: Wed 10/21/2009 10:08
To: hecnet at update.uu.se
Subject: Re: [HECnet] Next retro comms project?
Would you be willing to sell it?
On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 10:04 AM, Steve Davidson <jeep at scshome.net> wrote:
I have a copy of PATHWORKS for MAC. It includes a DECnet client.
Haven't used it for years though...
-Steve
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE on behalf of Sampsa Laine
Sent: Wed 10/21/2009 09:41
To: hecnet at Update.UU.SE
Subject: Re: [HECnet] Next retro comms project?
More ideas I just thought of:
Amiga - I've got a DECNET package here for my Amiga, unfortunately the
license key only works with one node address - and I naturally have no
idea what that address is. I'll have a play once my Amiga is up and
running again though, the product looks pretty full-featured (comes
with MAIL, CTERM and file transfer client and server).
Old-school (68K) Macs: I don't know where I got this idea but I think
there might be a PATHWORKS client for classic Macs? Anybody ever use it?
Sampsa
On 21 Oct 2009, at 14:31, Steve Davidson wrote:
SNA can run on multiple physical transports using the gateways.
Serial, X.25, network adapter (specialized), etc are available. The
SPD's specify what is supported. Like Johnny said however, finding
some of this hardware may be a problem. One of the SPD's mentions
an intermediate server that I have never seen/heard of.
Sort of reminds me of the fun and games (not to mention expense) to
get
SNA to talk to Netware.
-Steve
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE on behalf of Sampsa Laine
Sent: Wed 10/21/2009 09:27
To: hecnet at Update.UU.SE
Subject: Re: [HECnet] Next retro comms project?
I thought SNA mostly ran on Token Ring or something?
On 21 Oct 2009, at 14:24, Johnny Billquist wrote:
There was a SNA product for RSX as well. Don't know if it required
special hardware as well.
But I very much doubt anyone will be able to find that now
anyway. :-)
Johnny
Steve Davidson wrote:
It can via the gateway software. I see several and it appears that
many
(if not all) require specialized hardware for the
interconnection. A
search for (vms sna gateway) will point you to the SPD's.
-Steve
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE [mailto:owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE]
On
Behalf Of Sampsa Laine
Sent: Wednesday, October 21, 2009 08:34
To: hecnet at Update.UU.SE
Subject: Re: [HECnet] Next retro comms project?
Can VMS talk SNA? If so, I'm in :)
Sampsa
On 21 Oct 2009, at 13:31, Fred wrote:
On Wed, 21 Oct 2009, Sampsa Laine wrote:
Where should we go from here? Setting up our own virtual X.25
PSDN tunnelled over IP maybe? Something crazy with SNA?
SNA! SNA! :)
I could set up Hercules here running MVS 3.8J ... ;) I'm sure
the folks have been able to get SNA to work within the emulator.
I set up Hercules and MVS once, but other than a novelty, I
really didn't do much with it, because most of my associates
wouldn't know a mainframe if it ran them over. I think it would
be interesting to get something quasi-public (on HECmet) going.
Fred
----
Lets call it for what it is - "legacy" is a term that people use
in a
polite but derogatory manner to imply that the future direction
they
prefer is not that which they view as the current direction.
<winmail.dat>
On Wed, 21 Oct 2009, Sampsa Laine wrote:
I thought SNA mostly ran on Token Ring or something?
I have an IBM PS/2 model (something) with both an MCA Token Ring card and and MCA Ethernet - and I even have a passive Token Ring Mau! (and a cable, somewhere ...)
Now if I could just find that gateway software. When I had access to a real mainframe, all of the PC's went through a handful of these PS/2's via Ethernet, and the PS/2's had token ring cards in them connected to a real FEP.
Fred
Very true!
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE on behalf of Johnny Billquist
Sent: Wed 10/21/2009 10:17
To: hecnet at Update.UU.SE
Subject: Re: [HECnet] Next retro comms project?
Sampsa Laine wrote:
On 21 Oct 2009, at 14:55, Bob Armstrong wrote:
Well, if we're going to go off into Wishful Thinking Land here :-)
* DECnet for BSD, especially 2.11 PDP-11 bsd. Yes, a 16 bit version is
significantly harder than a 32 bit version, I know, but there are several
real PDP11s out there running BSD that could be on HECnet. I know - I've
got one! We could use the Linux DECnet as a starting point - the dn
userspace utility programs might not even be that hard to port - but we'd
need a kernel wizard to do the tricky bits :-)
Just an idea, and I'm not a network programming guru at all, but do we
really need to have stuff in the kernel? Could we not just have a
userland process that writes frames to the network interface* and then
apps talk to the server process? I imagine this is easier to both write
and debug...
Sampsa
* assuming we are able to write raw frames to the net interface of
course...
Performance will be horrible, and it will also probably be very
problematic. You also need some sort of a transition point between the
kernel and user space to even start doing this. Any user process who
would like to talk DECnet will either want to do system calls, or open a
device to do the communication. That system call, or device will then
access the memory area of the user process to read/write data from the
user process. If your protocol implementation also were in user space,
you then need to send it back from the kernel back into userspace again,
for the protocol process. And you also need to keep track of the
original user process, to keep a connection living, and you need to know
if the user process goes away, so that you can tear down stuff when it
happens. There are a lot of headaches in there, and having a user
process doing it isn't really that helpful.
It's a common mistake to think that this will actually be easier just
because the protocol is implemented as a user space process. It isn't.
The only thing that becomes easier is that once the basic framework is
in place, you can more easily install and remove the code that
implements the protocols. But since buggy protocol implementations often
corrupt more than can be fixed, you often end up needing to reboot anyway.
And we still have the horrible performance issues...
Johnny
Sampsa Laine wrote:
On 21 Oct 2009, at 14:55, Bob Armstrong wrote:
Well, if we're going to go off into Wishful Thinking Land here :-)
* DECnet for BSD, especially 2.11 PDP-11 bsd. Yes, a 16 bit version is
significantly harder than a 32 bit version, I know, but there are several
real PDP11s out there running BSD that could be on HECnet. I know - I've
got one! We could use the Linux DECnet as a starting point - the dn
userspace utility programs might not even be that hard to port - but we'd
need a kernel wizard to do the tricky bits :-)
Just an idea, and I'm not a network programming guru at all, but do we really need to have stuff in the kernel? Could we not just have a userland process that writes frames to the network interface* and then apps talk to the server process? I imagine this is easier to both write and debug...
Sampsa
* assuming we are able to write raw frames to the net interface of course...
Performance will be horrible, and it will also probably be very problematic. You also need some sort of a transition point between the kernel and user space to even start doing this. Any user process who would like to talk DECnet will either want to do system calls, or open a device to do the communication. That system call, or device will then access the memory area of the user process to read/write data from the user process. If your protocol implementation also were in user space, you then need to send it back from the kernel back into userspace again, for the protocol process. And you also need to keep track of the original user process, to keep a connection living, and you need to know if the user process goes away, so that you can tear down stuff when it happens. There are a lot of headaches in there, and having a user process doing it isn't really that helpful.
It's a common mistake to think that this will actually be easier just because the protocol is implemented as a user space process. It isn't. The only thing that becomes easier is that once the basic framework is in place, you can more easily install and remove the code that implements the protocols. But since buggy protocol implementations often corrupt more than can be fixed, you often end up needing to reboot anyway.
And we still have the horrible performance issues...
Johnny
Could you possible ZIP it up and send to me? I'd love to have a play...
Sampsa
On 21 Oct 2009, at 15:04, Steve Davidson wrote:
I have a copy of PATHWORKS for MAC. It includes a DECnet client.
Haven't used it for years though...
-Steve
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE on behalf of Sampsa Laine
Sent: Wed 10/21/2009 09:41
To: hecnet at Update.UU.SE
Subject: Re: [HECnet] Next retro comms project?
More ideas I just thought of:
Amiga - I've got a DECNET package here for my Amiga, unfortunately the
license key only works with one node address - and I naturally have no
idea what that address is. I'll have a play once my Amiga is up and
running again though, the product looks pretty full-featured (comes
with MAIL, CTERM and file transfer client and server).
Old-school (68K) Macs: I don't know where I got this idea but I think
there might be a PATHWORKS client for classic Macs? Anybody ever use it?
Sampsa
On 21 Oct 2009, at 14:31, Steve Davidson wrote:
SNA can run on multiple physical transports using the gateways.
Serial, X.25, network adapter (specialized), etc are available. The
SPD's specify what is supported. Like Johnny said however, finding
some of this hardware may be a problem. One of the SPD's mentions
an intermediate server that I have never seen/heard of.
Sort of reminds me of the fun and games (not to mention expense) to
get
SNA to talk to Netware.
-Steve
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE on behalf of Sampsa Laine
Sent: Wed 10/21/2009 09:27
To: hecnet at Update.UU.SE
Subject: Re: [HECnet] Next retro comms project?
I thought SNA mostly ran on Token Ring or something?
On 21 Oct 2009, at 14:24, Johnny Billquist wrote:
There was a SNA product for RSX as well. Don't know if it required
special hardware as well.
But I very much doubt anyone will be able to find that now
anyway. :-)
Johnny
Steve Davidson wrote:
It can via the gateway software. I see several and it appears that
many
(if not all) require specialized hardware for the
interconnection. A
search for (vms sna gateway) will point you to the SPD's.
-Steve
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE [mailto:owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE]
On
Behalf Of Sampsa Laine
Sent: Wednesday, October 21, 2009 08:34
To: hecnet at Update.UU.SE
Subject: Re: [HECnet] Next retro comms project?
Can VMS talk SNA? If so, I'm in :)
Sampsa
On 21 Oct 2009, at 13:31, Fred wrote:
On Wed, 21 Oct 2009, Sampsa Laine wrote:
Where should we go from here? Setting up our own virtual X.25
PSDN tunnelled over IP maybe? Something crazy with SNA?
SNA! SNA! :)
I could set up Hercules here running MVS 3.8J ... ;) I'm sure
the folks have been able to get SNA to work within the emulator.
I set up Hercules and MVS once, but other than a novelty, I
really didn't do much with it, because most of my associates
wouldn't know a mainframe if it ran them over. I think it would
be interesting to get something quasi-public (on HECmet) going.
Fred
----
Lets call it for what it is - "legacy" is a term that people use
in a
polite but derogatory manner to imply that the future direction
they
prefer is not that which they view as the current direction.
<winmail.dat>
<winmail.dat>
