2 Mar
2020
2 Mar
'20
8:56 p.m.
On Mar 2, 2020, at 10:26 AM, Robert Armstrong <bob
at jfcl.com> wrote:
You haven't said how you plan to connect on your end (or if you did, I
missed it).
I may have forgotten to think that out loud. My preference would be to use PyDECnet for my
upstream connection. I already run a *nix box as my local router and DNS server. I
haven't used Multinet; from what I've read about it, it doesn't appeal to me
much for my 2020 use cases. When I previously started looking into Cisco emulation in
order to use it for GRE, it looked like a whole big learning curve of stuff that
doesn't interest me in its own right, and which I'd rather avoid if I can.
And you'll have only one connection to me for all
your machines. Whatever
you connect to me will serve as a DECnet router for the rest of your
machines, and you'll have to set up some kind of local network at your
location to interconnect all of them.
That's exactly what I'd prefer to do. One external router (ideally, a PyDECnet
instance), with my local machines able to talk to each other on the local ethernet whether
or not the PyDECnet instance is presently connected upstream. I'd probably also run a
SIMH emulation or two on the same host that's running PyDECnet so I could have some
usually-on VAX and/or PDP-11 presence on my home net even though the big space-heaters
would be off most of the time.
And the idea of a Ham radio AX.25 connection is cute but it's not
realistic. A) we're too far apart (I live in Silicon Valley) for anything
other than an HF connection and that'd be agonizingly slow, b) can't really
leave an HF transceiver running unattended all the time, and c) the
legalities of using ham radio for Internet connections are tricky at best
(the FCC doesn't allow amateur radio to be used for any commercial
purposes). Sorry.
No problem at all. It would be a a fun stunt to play around with if we were local to each
other, but I had no illusions of it being practical.
--
Mark J. Blair, NF6X <nf6x at nf6x.net>
http://www.nf6x.net/