Connections? - HECnet

4 May 2018

The other Johnny wrote:

...
  Just realized I should maybe make another comment
here.
 I don't fully know how Multinet under VMS is managed, or what 
 limitations there might be.
 My Multinet compatible implementation under RSX might have some issues 
 communicating with VMS nodes, but in general it seems to be working just 
 fine.
 The setup under RSX do not really have any problems with dynamic IP 
 addresses. But it does introduce a bit of exposure, since when the other 
 end has a dynamic address, Multinet will have to be able to accept 
 connections from anywhere. I have been pondering whether to enable 
 passwords on those links. But until now, it's not been a real problem, 
 since people scanning and probing ports have no clue about DECnet over 
 IP to start with. 
Shameless plug or something here:

I have a program called anftunnel which as the name suggests initially
was used to handle ANF-10 packets.  It has grown a bit from that, and
can do other things as well now.  Amongst what it can do is:

*  Set up a tunnel between two machines, with optional crypto and auth.
   The passive (listening) end needs a static address, the other don't.

*  Talk to an ethernet interface (via libpcap) and tunnel ethernet frames.

*  Terminate a (virtual) sync line and tunnel the frames.  Handle TCP and
   UDP encapsulated DDCMP lines of the SIMH variety.

*  Terminate a MULTINET DECnet-over-IP link.  (untested, but given how
   simple the encapsulation is...)

*  For ANF-10, it can connect an ethernet to a sync line.  This requires
   slightly molesting the packets involved.

It should be possible to use this to tunnel DECnet/Multinet between two
nodes and keep the Multinet part local to each host.

A slight perversion would be to connect a Multinet link to a DDCMP one...

Source tarball can be found at:

  https://www.pdc.kth.se/~bygg/tops/anftunnel.tar

...
     Johnny 
--Johnny (another one of them)