Re: RE: [Linux-decnet-user] Re: LATD 0.8

[Patrick C. <pa...@pa...>]

>It's been a while since I've had even 5 mintes to play... But the latd stuff is >_really_ interesting.... even interesting peripherally with respect to the >software product my company sells.... More on that later.
>
>A couple of things if you can spare a moment:
>
>First, let me congratulate you on a marvellous piece of work. I picked up 0.8 >& installed it right from the tarball & of course it _works_! Really fine job!

Thank you for those kind words. I am surprised and gratified at the amount of feedback I get for latd. I thought it would be a very minor piece of software but it's generated almost as much interest as the whole DECnet suite!


>Next, I ran into what looks like a weird little bug in the 'resize' command >from the X11 stuff..... It seems to not like /dev/tty from a lat inbound >connection ... transcript follows:
>

This is a problem with the PTYs on RedHat - if you comment out
-DOLDSTUFF in the Makefile then latd will use the /dev/pts PTYs and it should all work fine. My Debian system doesn't suffer from this so I assume it's Red Hat specific.

>Third, I tried a connect from DS90L+ per your BUGS that the connect didn't
>work - just wanted to pass on a screen scrape of how it went in case it is
>of any value to you - btw: do you _have_ a 90L+ you can test with? I think
>I might be able to roust up a spare if you don't...

I don't have a DS90L+, I had an email from Kenn in Ireland who has one and his didn't work. In the end it turned out that the DECserver would only talk to devices whose MAC address looked like DEC ones! so he changed his MAC address and I believe it is OK now.

I would like to fix the problem you are seeing though, a full tcpdump and the debug output from latd compiled -DVERBOSE_DEBUG should help. If you could get a DECserver to England easily it would make things even easier for me!

>
>Finally, my company's product is a web-based console management >system. We
>support LAT on VMS and Tru64 hosts. With the advent of your latd for linux,
>I am kicking around the idea of building support into our product for it.... 
>Doing so would NOT in any way involve bringing latd code into our product,
>but only talking to predefined lat devices, or fork/exec'ing latcp to
>issue commands _IF_ latd was already installed on the host. We'd point
>potential customers to your site to pick up the code for install.... Do you
>see any issues from your perspective or anything I should be considering
>about adding such support?
>

That sounds nice - I always thought of latd as part of a cluster console system! That's roughly what I use it for at home.

Once latd reaches 1.0(or maybe even 0.9) I will start releasing binaries in rpm and deb format so that will make life easier for those people who don't fancy compiling their own binaries.

Patrick