FWIW, you can?t/couldn?t do verification on an Ethernet circuit anyway. It only works
on point to point links. Command completion may be smart enough to only show you the
options that are applicable to your input so far, or maybe TOPS20 just doesn?t have it?
Bob
From: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE [mailto:owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE] On Behalf Of
Thomas DeBellis
Sent: Monday, March 2, 2020 3:55 PM
To: hecnet at Update.UU.SE
Subject: Re: [HECnet] Intermittent Connection with PyDECnet?
I appear to have neither CIRCUIT VERIFICATION nor NODE TRANSMIT PASSWORD, viz:
NCP>set cirCUIT ni-0 ? ALL
or one of the following:
ACTIVE BABBLE BLOCKING CHANNEL COST COUNTER DEAD
DTE DYING HELLO INACTIVE LINE LISTEN MAXIMUM
NUMBER OWNER POLLING RECALL ROUTER SERVICE STATE
TRANSMIT TRIBUTARY TYPE USAGE
NCP>set noDE venti2:: ? ALL
or one of the following:
ADDRESS CIRCUIT
or one of the following:
AREA BROADCAST BUFFER CONSOLE COUNTER
CPU DELAY DIAGNOSTIC DUMP HARDWARE
HOST IDENTIFICATION INACTIVITY INCOMING LOAD
MAXIMUM OUTGOING RETRANSMIT ROUTING SECONDARY
SEGMENT SERVICE SOFTWARE STATE SUBADDRESSES
TERTIARY TYPE
I may be mis-remembering how our DN200 was configured. I believe the Top-20 NCP parser
may have shared keyword tables with other DECnet implementations via BLISS at one point.
Anyway, I recall at least some of it was BLISS. I haven't look in that particular box
lately, but the parse tables appear to assembler now, with heavy uses of GLXMAC macros.
The Tops-20 operator interface has two 'sub-modes', as it were: NCP and LCP. NCP
parses DECnet related keywords. LCP is used for LAT configuration. The operator
subsystem is kind of neat; OPR parsers send packets to Orion, a communications server and
router. It notes an NCP subset and routes that to NMLT20 which contains just what you
think it would.
Early versions of NMLT20 (about 1980) appeared insufficiently productized. It could hang
in a loop or (more frequently) crash for no readily apparent reason. We submitted a
rather large number of SPR's... However, it's quite stable now; I don't
believe I've had a single crash. I have yet to come to a fully informed conclusion
about the lexical interface; I sometimes get the impression that it parses for more than
it can actually do.
Elsewhere in Tops-20, DECnet implementation is a mixed bag; most of the monitor code
appears finished; I go months without reboots and that is with active development. The
user mode code is another matter entirely. I had my hands full fixing a number of issues
with DAP and FAL. It was invaluable having heterogeneous HECnet nodes to test against,
RSX 11M+ and VMS. SETNOD needs some finishing and perhaps some additional functionality.
I have yet to look at FTS; I don't see how it can get or generate any traffic at all.
The monitor interface (NFT:) does not appear to be operational. Elsewhere (perhaps
Galaxy) appears to have no submission interface. Johnny and I have some minor tweaks to
flush out with MAIL11 (in addition to the changes that I've already put in).
On 3/2/20 3:25 PM, Robert Armstrong wrote:
I don't see where I would set an id and password in
7-1-CONFIG or in NCP.
Don?t know about TOPS-20, but in NCP/NICE/NML it?s
SET CIRCUIT ? VERIFICATION ENABLED
and
SET NODE ? TRANSMIT PASSWORD ?
The password the remote node sends has to match the one that?s associated with that node
in the local DECnet database.
Bob