Re: [Simh] Has anyone contacted VSI directly about Hobbyist Licenses ?

[Hunter Goatley]

As expected, in a web seminar just now, VSI confirmed that there will 
not be any kind of hobbyist license for VAX from them. The Community 
License program will include Alpha, Integrity, and x86. It remains to be 
seen exactly what the terms will be.


Hunter


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Re: [Simh] Newbie questions about VMS for VAX

[Hunter Goatley]

On 5/6/2020 6:47 AM, Vassil Daskalov wrote:

I have no access to physical Itanium,
Alpha or VAX hardware, so I plan to use SIMH to emulate a VAX machine.
Such configuration is certainly able to run NetBSD, so it should be
able to run at least some older versions of (Open)VMS, right?


Yes.



1. Can I still use the HPE hobbyist program, which, as I understand,
is closing? I tried to subscribe to it, but apparently it requires me
to be a member of some DEC club, and I have no idea how to do that. On
some webpages of these clubs I read that membership is free if I'm a
DEC or HPE customer, but I'm not one. Does this mean that I have to
pay money in order to use a hobbyist installation of VMS? If it is
possible for free, can someone tell me the easiest way to obtain a
license?


From a post from Steven M Jones last week:

   Should be able to do that here:
   https://www.hpe.com/h41268/live/index_e.aspx?qid=24548

   You'll need to be affiliated with a group in their list. I recommend
   DECUServe, my understanding is they don't have any geographic
   requirements. You can do that by telnet or ssh to
   eisner.decuserve.org, username REGISTRATION (no password, just hit
   Return), and follow the prompts. It'll take some time for the data
   to propagate to HPE if you have to create an account, measured in
   days not weeks.



2. About the versions of (Open)VMS. As I understand, 7.3 is the newest
version for VAX, and it's still rather old, but I'm okay with that,
and possibly with even older versions. Does the HPE hobbyist program
license older versions than 7.3 for the VAX?


The hobbyist PAKs work with all versions of VAX/VMS (OpenVMS VAX).



  Do all versions require
licenses?


PAKs were introduced with VMS V5.0, if memory serves.



  There are various old VMS versions circulating over the
Internet, are they any good?


All versions of VMS are good. ;-) But later versions certainly have more 
features. If I were starting just to play with it, I'd start with V7.3.


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[Simh] Re: Releasing terspy.mar - vax/vms terminal spy program

[Hunter Goatley]

On 3/25/2020 10:03 AM, Hittner, David T [US] (MS) wrote:


For a while, there was a company selling a SPY utility for VMS, as 
well as freebie versions floating around. The commercial version 
allowed the watcher to enter data in the watched session by using a 
special command sequence to enable remote data entry. I don’t recall 
any of the freebie versions ever allowing data entry from the watcher, 
for fairly obvious security reasons.


Clyde Digital Systems had AUDIT and CONTRL that let you do that (AUDIT 
logged, CONTRL let an admin watch and/or take over a terminal session). 
Networking Dynamics had PEEK and SPY, which were competing products.


I should say "has." Networking Dynamics still sells PEEK & SPY, and 
Raxco still sells AUDIT and CONTRL.


I worked for Clyde Digital.

There was a freeware program called WATCH. It did not allow for taking 
over a session, just watching it. Or maybe it did allow it and was just 
so buggy that you were advised not to.


Then there was the Supervisor Series, sold by Precision Data Systems. 
They were later acquired by Security Pacific Software Services. In 1992, 
they released the Supervisor Series into the public domain. At that 
point, I took it over, added features, fixed bugs, and maintained it as 
the Supervisor Series freeware project.


I maintained that for several years, but due to the litigious nature of 
yet another company with competing products, I never ported the 
Supervisor Series to Alpha (which means it was never ported to Itanium, 
either).


The Supervisor Series still runs on OpenVMS VAX V5.0 or later. You can 
find it here:


http://vms.process.com/scripts/fileserv/fileserv_search.exe?package=supervisor===Either=All===


There was also another highly privileged program on the DECUS tapes, 
GLOGIN, which allowed a privileged user to login as another user, so 
that you could see what application behavior occurred within the 
context of a specific user. I found a weird bug in one of our 
application programs that only occurred when the username was 
_exactly_ 7 characters long using GLOGIN to login as the user who had 
reported the bug that we couldn’t duplicate ourselves. J


The original GLOGIN used the pseudo-terminal routines that used to float 
around. When DEC added the supported PTD$ routines for pseudo terminals, 
I wrote my own version of that called HGLOGIN. Here's part of the readme:


   HGLOGIN lets privileged users log in to a named account without
   having to know the password for that account.  A process running
   under the target username is created.  Its input and output are read
   from a pseudo-terminal, which is controlled by HGLOGIN.

   Unlike BECOME and SWAP, the process created by HGLOGIN is a full
   process, with all the privileges, rights identifiers, quotas, DCL
   symbols, logical names, etc., as well as anything else that is set
   up in the target user's LOGIN.COM.

BECOME and SWAP were two other kernel-mode programs that modified the 
username and UIC of the running process to be some other user. They were 
handy, but they had kernel-mode code and they didn't change quotas, etc. 
HGLOGIN was also much safer to use, as it used a documented interface 
provided by VMS.


HGLOGIN is also available in my freeware archive. It runs on all 
platforms, but requires whatever version of VMS introduced the PTD$ 
routines.


http://vms.process.com/scripts/fileserv/fileserv_search.exe?package=hglogin===Either=All===

If you're not familiar with my VMS freeware archive:

http://www.process.com/resources/openvms/index.html


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Re: [Simh] Is it possible to simulate the first Vaxen I ever used?

[Hunter Goatley]

Pardon the reminiscing, but all of this talk about the 11/730 reminds me 
of my first job after college. At WKU, we had a VAX 11/785. After 
graduating, I went to work for Clyde Digital Systems. When I got there, 
I was surprised at the several bookcases full of SF novels scattered 
around the programmers' cubicles.


Turns out that Clyde had an 11/750 for business stuff and an 11/730 for 
the developers. I was the sixth or seventh programmer hired. I quickly 
learned that the 730 was seriously underpowered for that many 
developers. The coders would kick off builds of their products, then 
kick back and read a few chapters from one of the SF novels while 
waiting for their build to complete. 8-) I started going in to the 
office at 6 AM to have a couple of hours of the 730 to myself, and I 
also made use of the 750 when no one was paying attention. (The 750 
didn't have compilers, but most of my work was done in MACRO-32, so I 
could do assembly on the 750. The privileged code had to be tested on 
the 730, though, because I couldn't risk crashing the 750.)


The day we got our first VAXstation 2000, everybody was fighting over 
it, because it blew the 730 away.


Fun times. Now. 8-)

Hunter


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Re: [Simh] My old articles may be useful again

[Hunter Goatley]

I should have also highlighted the two series of articles that you may 
find useful as you play with VMS.


This is from the link I posted previously:

   During that eight-year period, I wrote a dozen articles about
   programming in MACRO-32, the VAX assembly language. At one time,
   that was my preferred programming language. I still do a little
   MACRO-32 work, but it hasn’t been my “go to” language for many
   years. All twelve of the MACRO articles can be found at the link below.

   MACRO Made Easy 

   The last seven articles I wrote were co-authored with Ed Heinrich.
   We had pitched a book idea about OpenVMS Systems Programming to DEC
   Press, but for various reasons, the book never happened. The project
   started as a day-long seminar we presented at DECUS Symposia a
   couple of times. Once the book fell through, we decided to turn our
   seminar into a series of /Digital Systems Journal/ articles.

   I’ve posted the articles here. Though they were written when the
   Alpha was new, the ideas presented in them are largely still useful
   techniques for systems programming under OpenVMS.

   Writing OpenVMS Privileged Code
   

I hope some of you may find them useful.

https://hunter.goatley.com/vax-professional-articles/

Hunter

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[Simh] My old articles may be useful again

[Hunter Goatley]

As some of you may know/remember, I wrote articles for /VAX 
Professional/ (later /Digital Systems Journal/) for from 1986 through 
1994. A couple of years ago, I posted many of my articles on my website. 
I wondered at the time why I was posting some of them, because they were 
written for VMS V4.x and subsequent VMS releases had made them obsolete. 
But now what's old is new again, so I thought some of you may be 
interested in a couple of them, in particular.


"A Debug Register Display Fix" - How to customize the DEBUG screen 
display in VMS V4.4 to match previous versions


"DCL Command RECALL extensions"

   CMD.MAR is a MACRO program that will allow a user to flush his
   command buffer, list all the commands stored in the buffer, save the
   commands by writing them out to a file, and restore commands
   previously SAVEd.

I don't remember what version of VMS included this functionality in the 
RECALL command, but this program is definitely useful under VMS V4.x and 
V5.x.


One of my most popular articles was about the DCL patch to extend the 
number of commands stored in the RECALL buffer. In VMS V4 through V5.5 
or so, DCL limited recall to 20 commands. It was a hardcoded limit. I 
figured out patches to DCL.EXE that would extend that limit up to 62 
commands. The article describes how RECALL works and how I figured out 
the patches. I have not posted that article yet, but the program is 
available here:


http://vms.process.com/ftp/vms-freeware/fileserv/dcl_recall.zip

I can't remember what versions of VMS this applied to, but it even 
worked on OpenVMS AXP V1.5, which tells me some version of V6 probably 
increased that hardcoded limit of 20.


I'll try to post the article soon, just for completeness.

https://hunter.goatley.com/vax-professional-articles/

And if you're not familiar with my VMS freeware archive, it contains a 
ton of great freeware for VMS, and many of the packages will run on old 
versions of VMS, too.


http://www.process.com/resources/openvms/index.html

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Re: [Simh] HPE has started emailing the final hobbyist licenses

[Hunter Goatley]

On 3/12/2020 8:11 AM, Gary Lee Phillips wrote:

What is the earliest version of VMS available for the Alpha? Anyone know?


6.2. There was OpenVMS Alpha V1.5, but it wasn't a full release, if 
memory serves. V6.2 was the first fully-functional release. That's the 
first version for which we supported our software (TCPware, MultiNet, etc).


Hunter


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Re: [Simh] OpenVMS Hobbyist Program

[Hunter Goatley]

On 3/8/2020 8:57 AM, Craig Berry wrote:

HPE does not need to be selling or supporting the software in order to collect 
royalties from those who do, and I suspect the commercial emulator vendors have 
the ability to issue PAKs for new and transferred VAX licenses, and make money 
for themselves and for HPE when they do so.


Good point. I had assumed HPE was the only entity doing that, but that 
may not be the case.


Hunter


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Re: [Simh] OpenVMS Hobbyist Program

[Hunter Goatley]

On 3/7/2020 5:37 PM, Gary Lee Phillips wrote:
Yes, quite important seems to be an understatement. HPE is dropping 
the program, apparently because the OpenVMS product line is now the 
responsibility of VSI. But I can find no sign that VSI will continue 
the hobbyist license program in any form. Those of us with actual 
Alpha/Itanium/Vax hardware may be completely shut out?


That's the way it's looking. SIMH VAXen, too.

As far as I know, even if VSI starts a Hobbyist program, it will not 
include VAX, as they have never had anything to do with the VAX version 
of VMS. Presumably, they have no legal right to create VAX PAKs, even if 
they had the software to do it (which they do, since the Alpha PAKGEN 
can create VAX PAKs).


I own two Alphas and also run Vax on Simh. This is not amusing. VSI 
appears to be focused on OpenVMS for x86 processors, which is fine if 
they can do that. But without a way to renew license keys our Alpha 
and Vax systems will be dead silicon. I don't require support or even 
patches. I just need to keep my systems running.


I had hoped that HPE would release non-expiring VAX PAKs, because why 
not? They're out of the game, and no one else has the code for VAX. But 
they apparently aren't going to do that, which effectively ends SIMH, 
VAX, and Alpha for all but commercial use with purchased commercial 
licenses.


Hunter


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Re: [Simh] Cluster communications errors

[Hunter Goatley]

On 7/20/2018 3:53 PM, Johnny Billquist wrote:


Well, I can at least confirm on a real 8650, the network also briefly 
goes down and up again when DECnet is started. If I remember it even 
happens independent of if you have the machine in a cluster or not.


Thanks.

As a followup, the SIMH instance has been running without incident, 
other than the single drop when DECnet is started, for over four days 
now. Everything has been rock-solid. Apparently, that Intel network card 
had some issue that was causing what I was seeing.


Thanks again for all the replies. It was a most enlightening discussion, 
and I have a much better handle on how SIMH works now.


Hunter


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Re: [Simh] Cluster communications errors

[Hunter Goatley]

On 7/20/2018 9:20 AM, Mark Pizzolato wrote:

I agree with Paul completely here and I wonder, at least for the sake of proving
the USB device is or is not a factor, why not merely share the host system's
primary LAN.  Nothing special to get this to work except changing the
ATTACH XQ argument in the configuration file.  When using that LAN interface,
without jumping through hoops configuring internal bridging, the host won't
be able to talk to the simh VAX instance, but I suspect that may not be a high
priority.


No, it's not, and I hadn't done that at first because I didn't remember 
seeing the host system's primary LAN device when I first started. I must 
have just overlooked it, because it's there now, and I just booted using 
it (attach xq eth0). (I was probably so bent on using the dedicated 
device that I overlooked the primary device when I did SHOW ETHER.)


I was also mistaken about the dedicated device. It's not a USB device. 
It's actually an Intel PCI-X card that it's in the host system. Which 
now makes me even more confused. ;-)


System booted using the system's primary device and is running fine, 
though it still had the drop/re-establish when DECnet was started. But 
everything else is working just fine. No subsequent drops, DECnet, 
TCP/IP, and clustering all working as expected.


We're just going to pull the second card and run off the primary LAN device.

Thanks again for all your help!

Hunter

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Re: [Simh] Cluster communications errors

[Hunter Goatley]

On 7/20/2018 7:58 AM, Paul Koning wrote:

Is that the Ethernet interface down/up that happens when DECnet sets the MAC 
address?  I assume you don't have a card that supports multiple MAC addresses.


It probably is. That makes total sense, and I should have realized that.


On the USB thing: USB bridge things are often consumer grade devices, and while they may 
"work" in the sense that you can get a packet in and out, I would not 
necessarily expect them to behave sanely under any nontrivial load.  The same way I would 
not expect to run a cluster on a $50 Ethernet switch.


True. We have some USB dongles we've used with CHARON-VAX for years 
without incident, but I don't even know if these are the same brand 
dongles. Even if they are, that doesn't mean anything, of course.


I'm not a hardware kind of guy, so I tend to miss some of the obvious 
things, like remembering that the "dedicated card" is a USB dongle of 
unknown make. ;-)



Good to hear things are looking better now.


Thank you all for your help!

Hunter

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Re: [Simh] Cluster communications errors

[Hunter Goatley]

Hi, Dave.

I run an ESXi host on a USDT system and use a USB3 LAN dongle to give 
me a seperate network for user/management traffic so I can use the 
onboard one for iSCSI. This was done following the artivle here:


https://www.virtuallyghetto.com/2016/03/working-usb-ethernet-adapter-nic-for-esxi.html


Thanks for the link!

I note that that USB interface can be dropping packets all the time, 
not a big problem if the protocols can handle that and RDP etc suffers 
no real issues. But running something like TotalNetworkMonitor on a VM 
there you do see that there are up to 50% or so ping packets lost in 
its probes.


Could be that you are seeing a similar behaviour where the protocol 
doesn't handle lost packets too well...


Yeah, that's what it sounds like. I'll try to run some other tests on 
the USB dongle to see if I see anything else odd.


Thanks!

Hunter

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Re: [Simh] Cluster communications errors

[Hunter Goatley]

On 7/19/2018 10:34 PM, Mark Pizzolato wrote:

The improvement by setting the port speed to 10Mbit suggests
that packet loss/overruns are happening and they are reduced
by limiting the wire speed.


Agreed, though nothing ever indicated any errors or overruns: not the 
switch, not NCP or LANCP on any nodes.



The arrival of DECnet's traffic might be causing a burst of traffic
that still ends up overrunning another systems ability to receive
it.  Do things change if you throttle the simh VAX down?

   sim> SET CPU NOIDLE
   sim> SET THROTTLE 25%


Wow. That was a flashback to 1987, when I was working on a VAX 11/730 
with four other developers at the same time. ;-) We all got lots of 
pleasure-reading done waiting for product builds


Continued this morning: I ended up going to bed, it was taking so long. 
I woke this morning to find that the startup took about four hours to 
complete, and it had spent the next three hours losing and 
re-establishing communications every 40 seconds. I'm guessing the system 
was /so/ slow that it didn't respond fast enough to suit the other members.


So I took it down again and did SET THROTTLE 80%.  Still considerably 
slower, but workable. And as soon as DECnet started, it lost 
communication and re-established it. It's now two minutes farther into 
the boot with no further drops.


It drops between the "Starting DECnet" OPCOM message and the first 
"adjacency up" OPCOM message. After that, all is well.


Thanks.

Hunter


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Re: [Simh] Cluster communications errors

[Hunter Goatley]

Here's where we stand on our cluster communications errors: nothing we 
did worked. We tried different ports on the switch. We tried forcing 
1Gbps. We tried forcing the port down to 10 Mbps. That actually seemed 
to help slightly, in that we only lost communications every 63 seconds 
or so, instead of every 15--60 seconds. But it would lose and 
re-establish connection to the cluster every 63 seconds.


So I decided to try setting up and using a TAP device, just to see what 
would happen.


Using the dedicated Ethernet card, it made no difference. It still lost 
communications every 63 seconds.


When I say dedicated Ethernet card, I probably should have stated 
earlier that it's a USB -> Ethernet device plugged into the system. I 
don't know what brand or model, but I can find out, if anyone wants to know.


So I decided to try tunneling through the "real" Ethernet port used by 
the Linux system. After figuring out what to do for the missing tunctl 
command under CentOS, I was able to set up a tunnel, and I did "attach 
xq tap:tap0". I then booted the system and wonder of wonders, miracle of 
miracles, it was seven minutes into the boot (yes, it takes a long time, 
mounting a slew of disks that needed to be rebuilt) before it lost 
communications. But it re-established them immediately, and as of my 
typing this, it was been twenty-nine minutes since that happened. No 
further drops. Normally, I wouldn't think twenty-nine minutes is enough 
to prove anything, but when it was dropping every 15--63 seconds for two 
solid days, this sounds like a fix to me.


So what does it mean? One thing it suggests is that the USB Ethernet 
device may be buggy or bad. I mean, it seems to work OK for TCP/IP 
communications, etc, but it sure sounds like it may be the part 
responsible for the problems. Especially since tunneling through the 
built-in Ethernet card seems to work and tunneling through the USB 
device did not.


These are the commands I used to set up the tap device for CentOS:

   brctl addbr br0
   ifconfig eno1 0.0.0.0  ; eno1 is the host's Ethernet device
   ifconfig br0 XXX.XX.XX.XX up   ; the IP address of the host system
   brctl addif br0 eno1
   brctl setfd br0 0
   #tunctl -t tap0
   ip tuntap add tap0 mode tap; Replacement for tunctl on CentOS 7
   brctl addif br0 tap0
   ifconfig tap0 up

I then just did "xq attach tap:tap0" in the init file. I guess I should 
set up a special MAC address, but I haven't yet, and so far, nothing 
seems amiss.


While I thought having a dedicated Ethernet device would be the simplest 
thing, I can live with tunneling it through the shared Ethernet device, 
especially since it works and the former does not. ;-)


Thank you for all of your input over the past couple of days, and thank 
you for all of your work on SIMH!


Hunter

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Re: [Simh] Cluster communications errors

[Hunter Goatley]

Another data point. After more playing around and several reboots, I can 
confirm that with tunneling using the host system's Ethernet device, 
communications with other cluster members /only/ drops when DECnet is 
started.


   %%%  OPCOM  19-JUL-2018 23:14:55.58  %%%
   Message from user DECNET on DARTH
   DECnet starting

   %CNXMAN,  lost connection to system QUEST
   %CNXMAN,  lost connection to system GALAXY
   %CNXMAN,  re-established connection to system FASTER
   %CNXMAN,  quorum lost, blocking activity
   %CNXMAN,  re-established connection to system VADER
   %CNXMAN,  re-established connection to system QUEST
   %CNXMAN,  quorum regained, resuming activity

That's not a full log, but as soon as I see the OPCOM message about 
DECnet starting, I get the "lost connection" messages, then the 
"re-established" messages, and then everything is fine afterward.


Hunter

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Re: [Simh] Cluster communications errors

[Hunter Goatley]

On 7/18/2018 4:18 PM, Paul Koning wrote:


You mentioned that some of this is real hardware and some is simulated.  It 
might be helpful to post a map showing the setup, including interface models, 
link speeds, and switch models.


I'll have to see about getting that. I think I mentioned that I'm not 
physically located with the equipment.



Are the interface speeds all the same?  LAVC was built for 10 Mbps Ethernet, 
and while running it faster should be ok, running mixed speeds may create more 
congestion than the protocol is comfortable with.


Good point.


Is there any way to show packet loss counts?  Can you run DECnet, and if you 
put a significant load on DECnet connections, do the DECnet counters show any 
errors?
The counters I've checked via NCP and LANCP show no errors, no 
collisions, no overruns.


Mark wrote:

   It might be better to hard set the Linux simh host system's port to 10Mbit
   on the switch.  That would help with the potential for overrunning the 
original
   DEC hardware...

I just asked my colleague to try forcing that.

And I take that back about turning on throttling not making a 
difference. It has made a difference---the system is no longer coming 
all the way up. I'm not sure why, as the reasons long ago scrolled away 
because of all of the "lost connection" messages. I didn't think to 
record them.


Thanks!

Hunter


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Re: [Simh] Cluster communications errors

[Hunter Goatley]

On 7/18/2018 3:38 PM, Hunter Goatley wrote:


I know it's currently as set to autosense. I'll try forcing the speed 
and duplex.




I was told:

   The router is reporting that the port auto-sensed 1Gbit duplex, but
   I just manually forced it to that to be sure.

No change in behavior, unfortunately.

Hunter


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Re: [Simh] Cluster communications errors

[Hunter Goatley]

Hi, Mark.

Meanwhile, from what you’ve mentioned it seems you’ve got a simh 
instance talking to real DEC hardware.




Yes, the switch isn't DEC, but most of the other nodes in the cluster 
are real DEC hardware.


Using the 4.0 Current codebase, you might want to look at: HELP XQ 
CONFIG SET THROTTLE




Interesting. Thanks. I just read that and enabled throttling, but just 
with a sample SET XQ THROTTLE=ON. I'll see what that does.


Not enough. It has lost connection several times during the boot  I 
haven't studied the timings enough to have any idea what I might specify 
for TIME, BURST, or DELAY.


You may also want to show us the simh VAX configuration file you are 
using…




Something else I meant to include:

   load -r /usr/local/vax/data/ka655x.bin
   attach nvr /usr/local/vax/data/nvram.bin
   set cpu 256m
   set rq0 ra92
   attach rq0 /usr/local/vax/data/darth.vdisk
   set rl disable
   set ts disable
   attach xq eth0
   set xq throttle=on
   dep bdr 0
   boot cpu

Thanks!

Hunter

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Re: [Simh] Cluster communications errors

[Hunter Goatley]

Thanks, Dave. I meant to try to double-check the settings. I don't have 
physical access to the system, so I'll ask someone to double-check the card 
and the switch.


I know it's currently as set to autosense. I'll try forcing the speed and 
duplex.


Thanks!

Hunter
---
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On July 18, 2018 3:34:59 PM Dave Wade  wrote:


Hunter,

Is it set to Autosense Speed and Duplex? Is it getting confused? Can it be 
set to a fixed speed.


Dave



From: Simh  On Behalf Of Hunter Goatley
Sent: 18 July 2018 16:58
To: Simh 
Subject: Re: [Simh] Cluster communications errors



My mistake. I'm not running V4.0, I'm running V3.10-0 RC1.

After posting, it dawned on me that I should have tried SIMH V3.9.0, but it 
fails to boot:


(BOOT/R5:0 DUA0



  2..
-DUA0
  1..0..

HALT instruction, PC: 4C02 (HALT)
sim>

I'm not sure why. I'm using the KA655x.bin that came with V3.9.0 and a new 
nvram.bin file, but everything else is the same as the V3.10-0 RC1 instance.


I just downloaded the current GitHub sources and compiled them ( 
<https://github.com/simh/simh/commit/15fd71b97c8aaec29dc1bbbd3473c3f0d582c9ff> 
15fd71b). It boots, but I see the same behavior of losing connection to the 
cluster.


I also should have mentioned that this dedicated Ethernet card is plugged 
into the same switch as all of the other cluster members, so that shouldn't 
be an issue.


Thanks.

Hunter


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Re: [Simh] Cluster communications errors

[Hunter Goatley]

My mistake. I'm not running V4.0, I'm running V3.10-0 RC1.

After posting, it dawned on me that I should have tried SIMH V3.9.0, but 
it fails to boot:


   (BOOT/R5:0 DUA0



  2..
   -DUA0
  1..0..

   HALT instruction, PC: 4C02 (HALT)
   sim>

I'm not sure why. I'm using the KA655x.bin that came with V3.9.0 and a 
new nvram.bin file, but everything else is the same as the V3.10-0 RC1 
instance.


I just downloaded the current GitHub sources and compiled them (15fd71b 
). 
It boots, but I see the same behavior of losing connection to the cluster.


I also should have mentioned that this dedicated Ethernet card is 
plugged into the same switch as all of the other cluster members, so 
that /shouldn't/ be an issue.


Thanks.

Hunter

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[Simh] Cluster communications errors

[Hunter Goatley]

Good morning.

I recently set up SIMH running under Linux to replace some aging VAX 
hardware. The SIMH instance is about 30% faster than the actual 
hardware, which is a nice win. I'm running the current code from GitHub, 
which I downloaded on Monday.


I have a dedicated Ethernet device on the Linux system for the SIMH 
instance.


It's in a cluster of other machines, and all is working well except for 
one thing. Every 15--60 seconds, it loses and re-establishes contact 
with the cluster:


   %CNXMAN,  lost connection to system VADER
   %CNXMAN,  re-established connection to system VADER

And these OPCOM messages from VADER:

   %%%  OPCOM  18-JUL-2018 11:33:01.26  %%%(from node VADER 
 a)
   11:32:46.71 Node VADER (csid 00010078) lost connection to node DARTH

   %%%  OPCOM  18-JUL-2018 11:33:01.26  %%%(from node VADER 
 a)
   11:32:49.21 Node VADER (csid 00010078) re-established connection to node 
DARTH

It recovers every time, but everything hangs briefly while connectivity 
is re-established, and, of course, it's generating a ton of OPCOM 
messages, since this happens every 15--60 seconds.


Has anyone else seen this issue or have any suggestions?

Thanks!

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Re: [Simh] 101 Basic Games for RSTS/E (was Re: PDP11 on Simh for public access)

[Hunter Goatley]

On 1/28/2018 3:43 PM, khandy21yo wrote:
There is a project on gitnub called BLISS-M. Is it comparable with any 
version of bliss discussed here?


That's Matt Madison's attempt to create a BLISS that could be used on 
Linux and other systems. It's been a while since he last updated it, so 
I'm not sure what its current status is. The last time I tried to build 
it, I didn't have a new enough Linux system to get it to build. I was 
just looking at that yesterday, thinking that I should give it another 
go sometime.


(For non-VMS people, Matt wrote a number of pretty major freeware 
products in BLISS back in the day, most notably MX and NETLIB.)


Hunter

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Re: [Simh] 101 Basic Games for RSTS/E (was Re: PDP11 on Simh for public access)

[Hunter Goatley]

On 1/28/2018 3:49 PM, Johnny Billquist wrote:

It's more or less a dead language, unless you are in a very specific 
environment. So no, most likely it is not worth learning, if you are 
thinking that you might work with it.


If you're writing code that's strictly for VMS and will never be used 
anywhere else, BLISS is a fine choice, if you're interested in learning it.



Compared to C? Well, it is similar, I'd guess/say.


BLISS-32 was designed as an operating systems language, so you can 
easily do things in BLISS that you can't do in C. On VAX, you could 
write subroutines that could be called via JSB instructions in MACRO, 
for example.


On the other hand, C has the C RTL. BLISS has no RTL, so be prepared for 
lots of calls to LIB$ and friends and system services.


Hunter


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Re: [Simh] 101 Basic Games for RSTS/E (was Re: PDP11 on Simh for public access)

[Hunter Goatley]

On 1/28/2018 12:45 PM, Tim Stark wrote:


I have a question for you.  Does anyone know any documents to learn how to 
write BLISS codes?


It's also helpful to look at BLISS code. You can find all of the 
freeware programs in my VMS archive that are written in BLISS by going 
to this page and choosing BLISS for the Language.


http://vms.process.com/fileserv_search.html

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Re: [Simh] 101 Basic Games for RSTS/E (was Re: PDP11 on Simh for public access)

[Hunter Goatley]

Hi, Tim.


I have a question for you.  Does anyone know any documents to learn how to 
write BLISS codes?


I'd recommend Matt Madison's "Introduction to BLISS" paper that he wrote 
back in 1993. Postscript and PDF files can be downloaded from here:


http://vms.process.com/ftp/vms-freeware/fileserv/bliss-intro.zip

You may also be interested in the original article by Wulf that 
introduced BLISS. You can find a PDF and Postscript files that I 
formatted here:


http://vms.process.com/ftp/vms-freeware/fileserv/bliss-intro.zip


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Re: [Simh] VMS multinet DHCLIENT/SSH2 configuration problem

[Hunter Goatley]

On 1/28/2018 12:08 PM, Tim Stark wrote:


Folks,

I tried to configure DHCLIENT for DHCP access from my FIOS gateway 
router but DHCLIENT crashed during boot time and complaint undefined 
symbol in API libraries.


Also I am figuring out how to set SSH2 terminal server. I successfully 
generated SSH2 keys on emulated SIMH VAX system.


Does anyone know good DHCLIENT and SSH2 configuration instructions for 
OpenVMS 7.3 and Multinet 5.5?




SSH2 is covered in the /MultiNet Installation and Administration Guide/:

http://www.process.com/docs/multinet5_5/install_admin/chapter_28.htm

There's also an FAQ here:

http://www.process.com/support/multinet/faq/ssh.html

The DHCP client is documented here:

http://www.process.com/docs/multinet5_5/install_admin/chapter_16.htm

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Re: [Simh] BLISS ( was Re: 101 Basic Games for RSTS/E (was Re: PDP11 on Simh for public access))

[Hunter Goatley]

On 1/26/2018 3:28 PM, Timothe Litt wrote:

Sounds right.  The -16 and -36 versions stayed with the native backend 
and didn't get much attention once GEM took off.  At least, I don't 
recall GEM support for them.


I believe that's correct.

Alpha pretty much repeated the VAX route (plus the stupid mistake of 
splitting the VMS sources).  It cross-compiled from VAX to simulation,


I was porting a lot of freeware from VAX to Alpha when all that was 
available were the cross-compilers. The BLISS cross-compiler was great, 
but the early C cross-compilers were more problematic.


All three (CMU ,BLISS, GEM) back ends used considerable creativity in 
interpreting the instruction sets, and as time went on gave hand-coded 
assembler a run for its money.  They especially liked to do 
computations with bizarre-looking address calculations.  (Not all of 
which ran fast on all processors.) In one case, a particularly 
"clever" encoding of a test on a link-time constant broke RMS on an 
unreleased VAX CPU. Interestingly, this one instruction was the ONLY 
time this construct was encountered in all of VMS (including the top 
dozen layered products), so waiting for the hardware spin wasn't as 
bad as it might have been.


I vaguely remember hearing about that.

BLISS-32 on VAX generated some amazing optimizations. Before I got into 
BLISS, I programmed almost exclusively in MACRO-32, and it was fun to 
compare code I wrote to the assembly code generated by the BLISS 
compiler. Several times, I encountered generated code that was a lot 
more efficient than the code I wrote, which I thought was very 
efficient. I learned a few MACRO tricks looking at the code generated. 
It was less fun trying to understand the GEM output for Alpha. ;-)


Every time I do handstands with C #if/#define I still wish for BLISS 
%if and %macro.  (I once had to port a few 100K lines of my BLISS code 
to C on a 68000, and even with automation, converting macros and 
keyword initialized data structures to C was a painful exercise in 
devolution by obfuscation...)


Yes, the BLISS macros and lexicals are awesome, and it also kills me 
that C never had them.


Hunter

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Re: [Simh] 101 Basic Games for RSTS/E (was Re: PDP11 on Simh for public access)

[Hunter Goatley]

On 1/26/2018 2:22 PM, Timothe Litt wrote:


BLISS would have done better in the outside world, except for the 
DECision to price it higher than the market would bear.


Indeed! I was fortunate to get access to BLISS in college thanks to 
DEC's CSLG program, but it was their second-most expensive compiler 
license (after Ada), so virtually no one outside of DEC used it. When 
they originally released Alpha, they weren't planning to make the BLISS 
compiler available, but I and others worked to try to get DEC to change 
that. As I'm sure you know, in the end, they released it with a free 
license for both VAX and Alpha (and Itanium), but it was far too late 
for most people to have any interest in adopting it. I still do some 
BLISS coding, but I'm one of the few that I know of still doing it.


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Re: [Simh] Rainbow100

[Hunter Goatley]

On 7/20/2017 1:06 PM, Timothe Litt wrote:

I didn't mean used EXCLUSIVELY with the the -20 & VAX.


And I didn't mean for my reply to suggest that I thought you did. ;-)  I 
was just mentioning the system, and not trying to correct you.


They were sold there because of their price point, but would happily 
talk on any ASCII RS232 line.  Perhaps your college got a good deal - 
or a donation.


I'm not sure which it was. Probably both.

Still, GiGi was a neat toy, and would have seemed impressive against a 
backdrop of VT100s...


It did!

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Re: [Simh] Questions about VT emulation

[Hunter Goatley]

On 5/28/2017 10:24 AM, Michael Unger wrote:


Rather recently I found the "Tera Term Project Page" [1] by chance:

| [...] Tera Term is open source free software terminal emulator
| supporting UTF-8 protocol. Now TTSSH supports SSH2 protocol
| (Original version supports SSH1).

But I can't comment on the program's quality so far. At least there seem
to be several localized versions.


Tera Term has been my emulator of choice for at least the past 17 years. 
I much prefer it to PuTTY.



[1] <https://osdn.net/projects/ttssh2/>



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Re: [Simh] Running simh vax on amazon EC2

[Hunter Goatley]

On 7/9/2015 1:31 PM, Johnny Billquist wrote:

On 2015-07-09 19:45, BDC wrote:

Is there ssh server for vax vms?


Yes. Process Software's tcpware includes ssh as far as I can remember.


Yes, as does Process Software's MultiNet. Both are available for OpenVMS 
Hobbyist use.


Process Software: OpenVMS Hobbyist Program 
http://www.process.com/psc/resources/openvms-resource-center/hobbyist/


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