HECnet

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6 participants
15552 discussions

by Wilm Boerhout

Hail all you RSTS buffs! One of my nodes (PIRSTS) is running RSTS V10.1L and DECnet V4.1 Ever since I am on HECnet, I have observed that job slots are filled over time with jobs under the DECnet account [29,206] in HB state, up to the point that the job max is reached, and I cannot log in anymore. My working hypothesis is that the polling processes (for HECnet mapping and other inquiring minds - you know who you are) keep creating new jobs, instead of reusing old ones. Is there a way to tell DECnet/E that it should not keep jobs in HB state, but log them out after use? Or reuse existing jobs on incoming connection requests? On DECnet/VMS there are timer and other logicals that steer this behavior. Running a daily kill job seems, well, overkill. Thanks, Wilm

2 years, 2 months

Replacement for tachometer sensors on RA8x drives?

by Robert Armstrong

I've discovered that three of my four RA8x drives have failed due to bad tachometer optical sensors. Apparently the material these guys were potted with decades ago gradually turns opaque and, being as they're "optical", that's Really Bad. Has anybody else had this issue? Anybody found a replacement for them? It's just an IR LED and a phototransistor in a fancy plastic housing, and that's still pretty common devices these days. I just need one that's mechanically compatible with the RA8x HDA. A modern production replacement seems like a better plan than a new old stock replacement since any old production ones are just as likely to be bad. Bob

2 years, 2 months

pyDECnet help

by Brian Hechinger

Is anyone who's familiar with pyDECnet configuring available on a communication system that's less async than email? I've got Matrix, IRC, Discord, and Slack as well as WhatsApp and Signal available to me. Thanks! -brian

2 years, 2 months

An example of non-optimal setup

by Johnny Billquist

I thought I'd share an example of a non-optimal setup for people, so that you can understand a little better what we currently have. This is from area 1 to area 34. More specifically ANKE to area 34. Now, physically, ANKE is in Stockholm, Sweden, while A34RTR is in Båtbyggartorp, Sweden. They are actually not that far from each other, physically, if you look on a map. Maybe 40 kilometers at the most. However, in HECnet, it is 3 hops, and a cost of 20. Now, when ANKE wants to talk to area 34, the next hops are: PYTHON - New Boston, NH, USA (cost 8) IMPRTR - Washington DC, USA (cost 4) and then I *think* it must be A34RTR, since that should be the final hop, but since both IMPRTR and A34RTR are Cisco boxes, I can't see. And a guess that the cost of that last hop would be 8. But clearly, such a roundabout way to talk to such a close node is kindof silly. :-) We should have reasonable links, in reasonable directions, and with appropriate costs, so that we don't have things like this. No good reason to. It's not like we need to pay money to have physical cables installed between places. (This must have been such a fun work back in the day when you needed to actually pay for the physical cables...) If the link to PYTHON went down, the alternative route would be through A39RTR(9), PYRTR(2), IMPRTR(4) and then A34RTR. The costs in parenthesis. (A cost of 2 between A39RTR and PYRTR seems rather cheap, but what do I know?) A few suggestions on how to look at things: If you have a machine that talks NICE, you can examine for both VMS, RSX and PyDECnet, what the next hop towards an area is. Giving examples on MIM: .ncp tell anke sho area 34 stat Area status as of 10-SEP-22 15:34:49 Next Area State Cost Hops Circuit Node 34 Reachable 20 3 DMC-15 41.1 (PYTHON) .ncp tell anke sho cir dmc-15 cha Circuit characteristics as of 10-SEP-22 15:36:02 Circuit = DMC-15 Level one cost = 8 Hello timer = 60, Listen timer = 630 This can then be repeated for node PYTHON and so on. But as noted, when you get to a Cisco box, you can't do this. Cisco boxes do not speak NICE. Johnny -- Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus || on a psychedelic trip email: bqt(a)softjar.se || Reading murder books pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol

2 years, 2 months

L2 redundancy

by Paul Koning

I just had a conversation with one of the operators of a HECnet L2 router who has demoted it to L1 because of connectivity issues to other areas. That prompted some thinking about the DECnet requirements for fault tolerance. The basic principle of DECnet Phase IV is that L1 routing (within an area) involves only routers of that area, and L2 routing (across areas) involves only L2 routers. Phase V changes that to some extent, but HECnet is not Phase V and isn't likely to be. :-) In addition, L1 routers send out of area traffic to some L2 router in their area, but without any awareness of the L2 topology. This has several consequences: 1. If some of the L2 routers in your area can't see the destination area but others can, you may not be able to communicate even though it would seem that there is a way to get there from here. 2. If your area is split, i.e., some of its L2 routers can see one subset of the nodes in the area and other L2 routers can see a different subset, then out of area traffic inbound to that area may not reach its destination -- if it enters at the "wrong" L2 entry point. I believe the issue I mentioned at the top was #1: one of the L2 routers went down and the remaining L2 routers of that area ended up at two sides of a partitioned L2 network. Obviously HECnet isn't a production network, but still it would be nice for it to be tolerant of outages. Especially since we can insert additional routers easily with PyDECnet or Robert Jarratt's C router. The HECnet map can be set to show just the L2 network (using the layers menu, accessible via the layers icon in the top right corner of the map). It's easy to see a number of L2 routers that have only one connection to the rest of HECnet. It's also clear that a large fraction of the connectivity is via Sweden, which certainly is a fine option but it's a bit odd for a node in, say, western Canada to have only that one connection and none to nodes much closer to it. The map display doesn't give a visual clue about singly-connected area routers for which there is no location information in the database (the ones plotted at Inaccessible Island). The data is there in the map data table; it wouldn't be too hard to do some post-processing on that data to find cases of no redundancy. I'm curious if people would be interested in trying to make HECnet more fault tolerant. My router (PYTHON) can definitely help, especially for North American nodes, and I'm sure there are a number of others that feel the same. paul

2 years, 2 months

A2RTR move

by Robert Armstrong

I think I already sent this to all the people who are directly connected to A2RTR, but just in case I missed anybody, here it is for general consumption - I have moved A2RTR to an Amazon cloud server. The new IP is now 35.82.76.235, although I strongly recommend that you use the FQDN decnet.jfcl.com instead. I've already updated the latter to point to the new IP. A few of you with passive, listen, connections on your end and who aren't checking the source IP don't actually need to do anything. The new A2RTR will just connect to you as before and you won't notice a difference. Those who have active connections to A2RTR, or who have some kind of source IP based filtering in place, will need to update the IP for A2RTR. Once again, I really suggest that you use decnet.jfcl.com if at all possible, but if not then the new IP is 35.82.76.235. Bob

2 years, 2 months

Ultrix support for Tops-10/Tops-20 NRT!!

by Thomas DeBellis

After I put the changes into Tops-20 Kermit to recognize Ultrix and properly check protocol, I finally got around to testing it against few hosts on HECnet. As I had dimly recalled from the late 1980's, Ultrix supports Tops-10/Tops-20 NRT, viz: Kermit-20>c nofar/st [Remote system *NOFAR*:: is running _ULTRIX-32_] [KERMIT-20: Connecting to DECnet node NOFAR::] and also: Kermit-20>c ostara/stay [Remote system *OSTARA*:: is running _ULTRIX-32_] [KERMIT-20: Connecting to DECnet node OSTARA::] Sure made my day! When I finish wringing some more bugs out of Kermit-20 (I'm redoing the parity routines to use string instructions), I'll see about testing against Ultrix in addition to Tops-10 and older versions of Tops-20 Kermit (I've got them going back to the 1980's) SETHOST currently cannot connect to these hosts as it reports incorrect configuration messages. That's probably an easy enough fix.

2 years, 2 months

HOWTO for VAX/VMS DECnet-Plus open_simh HDLC support and P.S.I.

by Trevor Warwick

I recently added HDLC framing support to the DUP11 and DPV11 devices in open_simh. This has only so far been tested with DECnet-Plus on VMS. I wrote up another couple of examples, showing how to use HDLC as a DECnet datalink, and also how to try a basic configuration of VAX P.S.I. for X.25 communication. They're here: https://notlikethatlikethis.blogspot.com/

2 years, 2 months

pyDECnet --daemon option?

by Robert Armstrong

Paul (or anybody) - has the -daemon (aka "-d") option been removed from pyDECnet v596? It's still listed in the doc files, but running it gives pydecnet: error: unrecognized arguments: --daemon Bob

2 years, 2 months

Linux NRT configuration message

by Thomas DeBellis

In my changes to Kermit-20 and SETHOST, I check the configuration byte to make sure that I'm communicating with either a Tops-10 or Tops-20 system. If it's not one of those, then I want to give a nifty, informative error message, such as: Kermit-20>connect APOLLO:: ?VMS type systems do not support Tops-10/20 NRT communications. Kermit-20>connect MIM:: ?RSX-11M type systems do not support Tops-10/20 NRT communications. Kermit-20>connect TRON:: ?RSTS/E type systems do not support Tops-10/20 NRT communications. Pretty nifty. I do this by doing a lookup into a handy table, indexed by the OS type, viz: hsttyp: eascii <RSTS> ;^d0 eascii <RT-11> ;^d1 eascii <RSTS/E> ;^d2 eascii <RSX-11S> ;^d3 eascii <RSX-11M> ;^d4 eascii <RSX-11D> ;^d5 eascii <IAS> ;^d6 eascii <VMS> ;^d7 eascii <TOPS-20> ;^d8 (TOPS20) eascii <TOPS-10> ;^d9 (TOPS10) eascii <RTS-8> ;^d10 eascii <OS-8> ;^d11 (!!) eascii <RSX-11M+> ;^d12 eascii <MCB> ;^d13 (the DN20!!) hsttyn=.-hsttyp-1 ; Number of defined operating system types So if the number I get is outside of this range, I give an unknown error, such as: Kermit-20>connect ZITI:: ?Remote system sent an illegal configuration message ZITI:: shows as a Linux system. Does anyone know what its configuration byte would be? How about Windows? Ultrix? Any others? I don't recall whether we used NRT or CTERM to get into our Ultrix machine (it was an 8650, consequently upgraded to an 8700). I think we used TCP/IP TELNET.

2 years, 3 months

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