I've been bumping into a number of bugs in the Tops-20 DECnet
implementation, some worse (like crashing with an ILMNRF and trashing
parts of files) than others (simple job hangs and undocumented
behavior.? Fortunately, I have been able to fix most of them; there's
only one that I had to program around and another that I have yet to
investigate.
Meanwhile, I have a great deal of testing to do of the SETND2 code.?
However, there are a number problems doing that, besides those alluded
to, above.? For a number of cases, I have to start from a fresh boot
with the node table completely empty.? There is no command to 'empty' or
reset it.? So that's a pain.? Another thing you can't do is extract or
inspect the full node population.
It occurred to me that the data structures and associated node
management routines that I wrote for the decisioning logic in SETND2
turn out to be fine for simulating the NODE% JSYS itself.? So what I do
is fork an inferior version of SETND2 and trap the NODE% with a TFORK%.?
It's starting to come together to the point where I need to model the
actual rules used for DECnet node syntax.
I know that a DECnet node can be a maximum of six characters long with
only the numerals 0 (zero) to 9 (nine) and the letters A to Z.? However,
I noticed some code in COMND% that checks to see that a node name has at
least one alphabetic character in it.? I had never thought about that
and was wondering what the actual standard says (or where that standard is).
Does is matter where the letter is?? In other words, are five numeral
zero's followed by the letter 'A' valid?? Is '00000A' OK?