Of course, you are free to try to work around the issue, but traffic captures 
will explain what is really happening and then determine what the simplest 
workaround might be.  Traffic analysis will either point to or eliminate the 
need or desire to swap cards.

I’d suggest that you try using the MultiNet IP stack.  I’ve had experience with 
MultiNet  for 20+ years and even now, leave telnet sessions connected for many 
days and never see a problem.  Switching to MultiNet will avoid the need to 
migrate users or configure a new OS from scratch or perform an upgrade.  I 
strongly suspect that both MultiNet and the HP TCP stack can be installed on 
the same system at the same time as long as you only start one OR the other in 
your systartup configuration.

From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On 
Behalf Of Lorenzo
Sent: Wednesday, April 30, 2014 8:30 AM
To: Mark Pizzolato - Info Comm
Cc: [email protected]; Rick Murphy
Subject: Re: [Simh] OpenVMS 7.2 VAX telnet failure

Before starting to dig into traffic captures I'd like to try two more things:

* a OpenVMS 7.3 setup on a new SIMH machine - if that works then I can think 
about migrating users and data from 7.2
* using a different ethernet card to rule out layer 1 problems

This problem is not easily reproducible, "it just happens", so I can only 
report back after a certain amount of time.
Thanks for now

2014-04-30 16:59 GMT+02:00 Mark Pizzolato - Info Comm 
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>:
As Rick suggested, you should capture traffic in both directions.  Wireshark is 
an excellent tool for that.  Additionally, Wireshark has built-in protocol 
decoders which can interpret what is happening in the TCP telnet session.  If 
you aren’t familiar with, or don’t want to dig into the details of the packet 
innards, you can save the capture contents, make it available, and let me or 
someone else can interpret the details and offer analysis.

From: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> 
[mailto:[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>] 
On Behalf Of Lorenzo
Sent: Wednesday, April 30, 2014 7:25 AM
To: Rick Murphy
Cc: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [Simh] OpenVMS 7.2 VAX telnet failure

What nmap is reporting should be the traffic from the VAX to the client.
No matter the client I use (e.g. telnet.exe, PuTTY...), all I get is an endless 
stream of chars, which matches what appears in the traffic dump.
Upgrading to SIMH 4.0 beta had no effect - after 14 hours I experienced the 
same exact problem.
During the telnet outage, which happened after ~14 hours of SIMH running, FTP 
was still working fine.

2014-04-30 2:50 GMT+02:00 Rick Murphy 
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>:
At 06:21 PM 4/29/2014, Lorenzo wrote:
Hi!
I'm running OpenVMS 7.2 VAX on a simh emulator, latest release
(V3.9-0 from 
<http://simh.trailing-edge.com>simh.trailing-edge.com<http://simh.trailing-edge.com>)
 and compiled with networking (libpcap, no vde).

The emulator has got its own network card to which it's attached.
The host operating system is Linux, kernel 3.11.
My issue is that after an apparently random amount of time (usually a few 
hours) the telnet server stops working.
I can't get any client to log in remotely - as soon as I connect to the OpenVMS 
machine,
all I get is a blank character sequence, as follows (dumped by nmap):

SF:NULL,1138,"\xff\xfb\x01\xff\xfb\x03\xff\xff\xff\xff\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0


There's a beginning of some TELNET options negotiation going on there.

That's the following:
255 (IAC)
251 (WILL)
1   (ECHO)
255 (IAC)
251 (WILL)
3   (SGA) [Suppress go-ahead)

That's pretty standard.
The series of 0xff (IACs) and nulls that follow aren't.

You really need to capture the traffic to-and-from. Is this coming from the VAX 
to your client, or vice versa?
        -Rick


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