Now that I'm done with Kermit-20, I wanted to get back to finishing up some other work that I had been doing.  FAL, DAP and NFT are in good enough shape for me to leave them alone for the moment, so that's another rabbit hole I've gotten myself out of.

I'm now looking fix an error that I somehow introduced into MMAILR (SMTP over DECnet).  Fixing this required modifying DDT, which I had to do to fix another issue I had introduced into Kermit.  I wanted to have a quick look at what Tops-20 hosts might be up on HECnet and wrote up a little batch job to use NETPTH to test connectivity.

NETPTH is a nifty utility to find paths between DECnet nodes.  It builds a connection the NCU's of various nodes to determine the path that a message might take to get there.  Think of it like traceroute or ping -R (RECORD_ROUTE option).

It almost never works...

Before I roll up my sleeves and jump into this I was wondering if anybody had any observations about the errors I'm seeing?

TINA:: PAMINA:: KLIO:: TWLGHT:: RARITY:: FLUSHY:: RBDASH:: APPLEJ:: PINKIE:: DISCRD:: TWENEX::

 From              Via           Back   Thru                  Cost    Hops
VENTI2 (2.522)   =>NI-0-0      / BRG-0   <= A2RTR  (2.1023)     -1      -1
A2RTR  (2.1023)  =>DMC-31      / 
?NETCFO Can't find Output Circuit parameter

SAMT20::
?NETURN Unreachable node

TOMMYT::

 From              Via           Back   Thru                 Cost    Hops
VENTI2 (2.522)   =>NI-0-0      / NI-0-0  <= TOMMYT (2.520)      1       1

BITXT2:: BITXT0:: MINDY:: FALLON:: JOSHUA:: OLAF::

 From              Via           Back   Thru                  Cost    Hops
VENTI2 (2.522)   =>NI-0-0      / BRG-0   <= A2RTR  (2.1023)     -1     -1
A2RTR  (2.1023)  =>
?NETCFO Can't find Output Circuit parameter

WALACH::

 From              Via           Back   Thru                  Cost    Hops
VENTI2 (2.522)   =>NI-0-0      / BRG-0   <= A2RTR  (2.1023)     -1      -1
A2RTR  (2.1023)  =>DMC-29-206  / 
?NETCFO Can't find Output Circuit parameter

SOL::

 From              Via           Back   Thru                  Cost    Hops
VENTI2 (2.522)   =>NI-0-0      / BRG-0  <= A2RTR  (2.1023)      -1      -1
A2RTR  (2.1023)  =>MUL-59-1016 / DMC-1  <= STORTR (59.1016)     -1      -1
STORTR (59.1016) =>GRE-16      / 
?NETCFO Can't find Output Circuit parameter

FENCER::

 From              Via           Back   Thru                  Cost    Hops
VENTI2 (2.522)   =>NI-0-0      / BRG-0  <= A2RTR  (2.1023)      -1      -1
A2RTR  (2.1023)  =>MUL-59-1016 / DMC-1  <= STORTR (59.1016)     -1      -1
STORTR (59.1016) =>GRE-16      / 
?NETPTH NTMAN failed, reason:
Parameter missing
 $