The Cisco DECnet router implementation does not speak "decnet management" as
we all knew. The way we are using them the tunnel end-points are on the Internet.
Most of the information "missing" is actually available through the SNMP MIB,
so if we could agree on a common read-only community and publish the IP addresses
of those routers it would be possible to complete Paul's map..
Attached info.
-P
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.