Thanks for all of the suggestions. They give me some ideas to work with.
I particularly like the idea of using dntask on the Linux side, but unfortunately that one
breaks the "If you already have a working DECnet network..." requirement. Unless
something has changed more recently than I am aware of, the DECnet support in Linux has
been broken for quite a long time. I had to install a very old distribution on the Linux
VM that I set up for doing some DECnet stuff, but this server would be running a very
recent distribution. It would be very nice if the Linux DECnet code started getting
attention again and could be updated to work in the latest kernels, but that's not a
task that I can take on at this time.
Alternately, it would be neat if there was a DECnet client implementation that could run
entirely in user space. Is there anything like that which I'm not aware of?
I think that the suggestions involving kludging something together to shut down the
emulated system via one of its terminal ports should give me something to work with.
I'll need to experiment to see if I can come up with something that doesn't let
any random user on (or off!) the system to trivially shut it down.
Hmm, I should look at the SIMH source to see if I can come up with a clean way to let SIMH
trigger the shutdown when it receives a SIGHUP.
--
Mark J. Blair <nf6x at nf6x.net>
http://www.nf6x.net/