Re: [Linux-decnet-user] DECnet for Linux on Ubuntu

[Chrissie C. <chr...@go...>]

I'm sorry you felt brushed off by this list by the Ubuntu comment. But 
there is no-one really supporting DECnet at all at the moment, so it's 
hardly surprising people are not "paying attention" to Ubuntu. Even when 
it was under development the people doing it (mainly me) only had the 
time to work on a few selected distributions - remember this was a hobby 
project and no-one was being paid to work on it. So no matter how high 
profile a distribution may be, if a developer hasn't had the time or 
inclination to install it then they can't comment on it.

For just terminal access then LAT is a far easier solution. It's 
entirely user mode code and doesn't require a lot of complicated messing 
about with MAC addresses that DECnet does so it won't interfere with TCP/IP.

The DECnet code itself still works as far as I am aware. The Kernel 
portion is totally unmaintained so if it gets broken by the other kernel 
developers (as has happened) then it will not get fixed by any DECnet 
developers, sometimes it will get fixed as part of other networking 
patches though. The user land packages are looked-after by Philipp 
Shafft when he has time, but effectively the whole DECnet system is 
orphaned and what you are most likely to get here - and did - is support 
from other users if they feel they can help.

Chrissie

On 25/06/2011 11:31, Bengt Nilsson wrote:
> I guess I am the source of this item.
>
> The story is like follows:
> I needed terminal access from Ubuntu to a very old VAX/VMS 5.5-2H system.
> I installed decnet on a small desktop with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, working fine.
> After upgrading to 10.10, the response to "dnlogin" was
>
> bnilsson@ubuntu:~$ dnlogin fyvax7
> Cannot connect to fyvax7: Rejected by object
>
> I reported it to this forum, and I got some suggestions, but no real
> solution in the beginning.
> The docs say that decnet must be started before the tcpip networking,
> and I suspected that the new "upstart" boot method was changing the
> order of things between 10.04 and 10.10.
> Upgrading to 11.04 did not improve the state of this behaviour either.
>
> On the forum, I got the suggestion to shut down the network, start
> decnet and restart the networking.
> This worked, I could again use "dnlogin" to connect to my VMS system.
> However, my tcpip now had only access to my own subnet, why, I do not know.
>
>
> Finally, I got the suggestion to skip decnet and use LAT instead.
> For the things I need to do, this was a better solution, without any bad
> side effects as far as I can see.
> So decnet is now removed from my desktop Ubuntu 11.04, I use "llogin"
> instead, and all is working fine.
> I will not put any more time into decnet to make it work for me, at
> least not for the time being.
>
> It seems the installation and startup methods for decnet need some
> tuning before it can be used with the current Ununtu.
> Someone with more knowledge than me need to take the time to intall
> Ubuntu and investigate what is going on. I was surprised to get the
> answer from the developers(?) that "we don't use ubuntu" and that was
> it. As Ubuntu is coming to be more or less mainstream, I would assume it
> needs to be paid attention to.
>
> Incidentally, I can mention that I did the network stop/decnet start
> tests on virtual Ubuntu 11.04 on a VMWare Fusion on my Mac, and that's
> how I found that it was working before I transferred this method to my
> real desktop Ubuntu. So setting up a test system does not need to be a
> great effort, a virtual machine will probably work fine.
>
>
> --
> Bengt Nilsson
> Nanofabrication Laboratory,
> Department of Microtechnology and Nanoscience,
> Chalmers University of Technology,
> SE-412 96 Göteborg, SWEDEN
> e-mail: ben...@ch... <mailto:ben...@ch...>
> tel: +46-31-7728480
>
>
>
>
> 24 jun 2011 kl. 20.18 skrev Gary Lee Phillips:
>
>> I've just joined the list and reading over the recent messages I saw
>> some comments to the effect that "DECnet isn't supported on Ubuntu"
>> (which I take to mean, it doesn't work.)
>>
>> I'm glad I didn't see this last week, because in my ignorance I went
>> ahead and installed the packages (from the Ubuntu repository) onto two
>> desktop machines running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx.)
>>
>> It took a little twiddling with the configuration, but just about
>> everything seems to work as expected.
>>
>> I have Alpha hardware running OpenVMS 8.3 and virtual (SIMH) VAX
>> machines running OpenVMS 7.3. Both DECnet and TCP/IP communications
>> are working between all of them.
>>
>> Please tell me which version of Ubuntu failed to work, because I'll be
>> careful not to upgrade to it. I'll be happy to answer questions about
>> my configuration and network setup.
>>
>> (Note that in order to get a Linux hardware host to communicate with a
>> virtual VAX running on the same host, I had to use a TAP/TUN setup to
>> create a virtual ethernet bridge, but that works well with both TCP/IP
>> and DECnet as far as I can tell.)
>>
>> --Altivo
>>