[HECnet] Downtime next week

On Thu, 20 Aug 2009, Paul Koning wrote: Excerpt of message (sent 20 August 2009) by Zane H. Healy: Ditto, though last I tried Linux DECnet was in the late 90's. It's also worth mentioning that DECnet/E seems to have trouble coexisting with just about anything, so DECnet/Linux isn't alone. :-) Oh really? That wasn't our experience when we built it... paul I suspect it is one of those "version creep" sort of things. I've noticed that VAX/VMS V5.5-2 is much happier talking with things such as RSTS/E, and IIRC even RSX-11M+ than say OpenVMS V8.3. Of course my secondary OS is OpenVMS (primary is Mac OS X), so my comments are coloured a little by it. Another area I've had problems with DECnet/E is with the network hardware itself, and software installation. It is incredibly touchy about your network switches. I had one switch that every other OS and network stack I through at it would work, not so DECnet/E, in fact I had to put the PDP-11 on a hub to be able to even install it, as I couldn't do the install when attached to the switch. The other installation problem was that the distribution kit doesn't like living on a 4mm DAT. You can install RSTS/E from 4mm DAT, but as near as I can tell, DECnet/E needs to live on a TK50 (or I assume 9-Track). It has been several years since I've been able to play with it much, has anyone managed to install DECnet/E on an emulated system? About 6 years ago it refused to install on either E11, or SIMH for me (of course at that point SIMH networking code was very primitive). IIRC, that is long enough ago I was using a different switch than the one that gave me so many problems. Zane