21 Mar
2025
21 Mar
'25
6:47 p.m.
On Mar 21, 2025, at 11:19 AM, Peter Allan
<petermallan(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I have DECnet Phase V set up on my x86 community package running VMS 9.2-2, mainly
because it did not come with Phase IV. That pushed me into learning Phase V
"stuff" after 30 years of managing to avoid it.
Hm, it's been a while but I thought the installation procedure for networking gives
you a choice, phase IV or V.
I do find that it takes a few minutes after booting
for it to recognise that Phase IV nodes exist on the LAN, but that it works at a sensible
speed after that.
That's odd, I would expect it to learn as soon as it sees hellos from those nodes.
I only have the one Phase V system, but several Phase
IV systems, so perhaps it is expecting to find other phase V nodes "out there"
and getting confused when there are none.
I too have just one Phase V system (like yours, a VMS/x86 node). It seemed to work ok,
though I haven't done much with it.
FWIW, my reason for installing it is to test Phase V. It's been many years since I
helped define Phase V, and in all those years I never actually had a running system. So I
thought it was about time. Another reason is the well known one "because it's
there". Some day PyDECnet will get Phase V support. If nothing else, stuff like
DecDTS would be useful.
The unfortunate problem is that the Phase V architecture specs are incomplete; a bunch
exist on-line but not all of them. The other problem is that the lower layers are in
substantial part defined by OSI standards, and finding reasonably accurate free copies is
not so easy either.
paul