mdm@cocktrice.uucp (Mike Mitchell) (10/07/88)
Does anyone have a good place to get information on the data transport level offered by DECNet? Our local DEC guys only know things about swapping boards. I have a piece of equipment that I would like to hook up to ethernet and get it to speak to a Vax running VMS. It would seem to me that a nice way to do this would be to get the equipment to speak DECNet, but I am not sure what this intails. Specifically, I am interested in how DECNet packets are formed, what kind of information is contained in them and how to get things to communicate. What would be ideal is talking to an ethernet controller card in the VAX and not worry about the VMS/DECNet stuff at all, however in my past experience I would guess that VMS would be very uncoprative at this level. What types of low level hooks does VMS offer into its networking capability? Can the mere mortal user of VMS access the low level hooks, or does it require a super human user to do this? My major expierence has been with Unix, and I know what type of networking interfaces are avalable for it. VMS is not my real strong suit, so I need some pointers in the right direction. Thank you for any pointers which could get me started. -- Mike Mitchell mdm@cocktrice.uucp ...!uunet!dmk3b1!cocktrice!mdm
jeh@crash.cts.com (Jamie Hanrahan) (10/08/88)
(The author of the referenced article wants to get a piece of equipment with an Ethernet port talking to VMS, either through DECnet or more directly.) I would favor the "more direct" approach. You certainly can issue $QIOs to VMS's Ethernet driver. u!The program that does this, and your other equipment, must agree on an Ethernet "protocol type" parameter to distinguish your packets from DECnet, LAT, and all the other Ethernet packets also destined from your machine. As you guessed, your other alternative is essentially to implement DNA layers 3 through 7 in your other machine. This would be a large job; I don't recommend trying this at home. :-) However, if you want to see what would be involved, order the following: Phase IV General Description AA-N149A-TC 4.0 DDCMP AA-D588A-TC 4.1 DDCMP AA-K176A-TK 1.0 Ethernet DL Func Spec AA-Y298A-TK 1.0 Ethernet Product Arch Spec AA-X440A-TK 2.0 Routing Layer Func Spec AA-X435A-TK 3.2 NSP Func Spec AA-K176A-TK 4.0 NSP Func Spec AA-X439A-TK 1.0 Session Control Func Spec AA-K182A-TK 5.6 DAP Func Spec AA-K177A-TK 2.0 NVT Foundation Services AA-DY89A-TK 2.0 NVT CTERM AA-DY88A-TK 4.0 Net Mgmt Func Spec AA-X437A-TK 3.0 MOP Func Spec AA-X436A-TK 2.0 Ethernet (the blue book) AA-K759B-TK (The above list courtesy of a previous message in this newsgroup, sent by Joel M. Snyder, jms@mis.arizona.edu .)