[Linux-decnet-user] More on Ubuntu 10.10 and DECnet

[Gary L. P. <tiv...@gm...>]

I got a chance today to try it.

The machine for test was a netbook running Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick
Meerkat). The kernel version was 2.6.35-8-generic-pae.

I did not try to make DECnet work over the wireless interface (yet)
but connected a standard 10base-T cable to a LAN hub.

I installed three packages from the Ubuntu repository:
libdnet
dnet-common
dnet-progs

One might expect these to have been brought up to date, but apparently
they do not function in the same way on 10.10 as they do on 10.04,
which is in fact what I heard here.

The main problem I could see was that the MAC address of the ethernet
interface was not altered to the appropriate DECnet address. Of
course, nothing worked.

As root, I did this:

ifconfig eth0 down
ifconfig eth0 hw ether aa:00:04:00:0b:0a
ifconfig eth0 up

This set up the MAC address to match my configured Phase IV address of 1.11.

With this one change, I found that everything I tried seemed to work,
including dnping, dndir, dntype, dntask, and dnlogin. The only
difficulties I encountered were with proxy on the remote VAX nodes,
and I believe I have to reboot those before they will recognize new
proxies added to the UAF.

Incoming connections initiated by the remote VAX nodes were being
rejected, possibly because dnetd hadn't been stopped and restarted,
but connections initiated by the laptop seemed to work as they should.

I will look into this further, and see what it might take to convert
the existing /etc/init.d/decnet script to the upstart format. Things
are busy, I'm not sure how soon I'll have that working.

--Gary