[HECnet] Downtime next week

Excerpt of message (sent 20 August 2009) by Zane H. Healy: 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. I could believe that. Once PDP-11 support was sold off, it would make sense for interoperability with those operating systems to suffer. 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). I can't understand that. RSTS just installs from plain old tape. Some kits are backupsets (ANSI labeled), there may be some DOS labeled tapes (meaning the drive you have must be able to handle 14 byte blocks) and the RSTS bootable OS install table is a mixed format tape (first DOS then ANSI). As for touchy about network switches, in what way? RSTS -- probably like most PDP-11 systems -- doesn't have much memory for network buffers, so if your switch bunches the traffic together then that might cause trouble. But apart from that it's just plain old Ethernet. The only OS I ever heard of having Ethernet issues was DECnet/DOS when used with a 3C901 NIC -- which has only a single buffer so it would croak on back to back packets. (The solution to that was "buy a real NIC".) 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. Apart from my stint in RSTS development, which by now is almost 25 years ago, I've mostly run RSTS and DECnet/E on E11. It's been a while since I did that, but it certainly worked in the past; that's how I did the interop testing with DECnet/Linux. I also at one time got DECnet/E running on a Pro-380, DDCMP only unfortunately. Some day I may write a DECNA driver... :-( paul