5 Sep
2020
5 Sep
'20
5:13 p.m.
Equally or more frustrating is when someone reaches out to get into the fun, we get to a
point where I open a port waiting for a connection, then complete silence! Leaves me
wondering what happened. I am sure you have had the same experience.
---
Supratim Sanyal, W1XMT
39.19151 N, 77.23432 W
QCOCAL::SANYAL via HECnet
On Sep 5, 2020, at 9:46 AM, Keith Halewood
<Keith.Halewood at pitbulluk.org> wrote:
Hi,
I know HECnet ?should not be regarded as a serious networking setup, nor should it be
expected to work 24/7? to quote Johnny?s web page on the subject. I find it fun in a ?way
back when? sense because way back then, as a student encountering VMS for the first time,
the real DEC VAX 11/780 two-node cluster at the university was connected together via its
CI and to the outside world by KMV X25 devices. The latter devices only talked the old UK
?Coloured Books? protocols and DECnet wasn?t (officially) allowed over Janet. So you can
imagine how underwhelming the output of various NCP SHOW commands was, even with the
addition of a standalone Systime VAX and the odd departmental MicroVAX to the DECnet,
using a mixture of KMVs, asynch DDCMP, eventually X25 1984 (pink book?) over Ethernet and
then unencapsulated DECnet over Ethernet. All this was around the time of VMS 5.4 I think.
Departmentally, we also used CMUTEK TCP/IP software to talk to the world when UK Academia
finally accepted that IP was the way to go and OSI just wasn?t going to happen.
Anyway, the point(s).
It?s really nice to be able to see a page full of circuits, nodes, areas etc. as a result
of being connected to the HECnet. In combination with Paul?s excellent mapper joining up
geography with connectivity, there?s a certain ?warm fuzzy feeling? being part of a
community like this? even if our nodes do more of the talking than we do. Harking back to
the hobbyist bit though, I have to stop myself from being disappointed when nodes drop off
for whatever reason especially long term. I?ve not seen inbound links from 29.400 and
29.500 for a while now. I occasionally wonder where area 8 is too ? geographically less
than 10 miles away possibly yet I?ve not seen any of it up and running on the HECnet
during my connection to it.
I?m not complaining about any of this, just wondering? as well as staying as far away
from source-code control topics as possible :)
Keith