Re: The stability crisis

sjw44@eng.cam.ac.uk
Sun, 4 Jul 1999 10:37:58 +0100 (BST)

Mark H. Wood wrote:
>
> On 2 Jul 1999, Henning P. Schmiedehausen wrote:
> [snip]
> > Actually I think, that sending the oops out over the network (as a
> > compile option, of course) is a nice idea. Maybe I will toy with this
> > sometime this weekend (don't hold your breath, though :-)
>
> There's actually quite a lot of experience with this sort of thing
> already. DECnet nodes have been upline-dumping over DNA Maintenance
> Operation Protocol for decades. (Literally. I have a copy of DDCMP
> Specification 4.0 dated 1978 which talks about MOP, and Stuart Wecker's
> paper on what became DDCMP is dated 1974.) Even if you are now thinking,
> "ewww, DECnet" it is worth studying. Alas my DNA documentation is for
> Phase III so I don't have anything on how MOP is used over Ethernet.
>
> We had racks of terminal servers, an InfoServer 150 and a WANrouter 250
> that never had any trouble loading or dumping over the wire.
>

Hi,

the specs for MOP are freely available, the URL is
ftp://gatekeeper.dec.com/pub/DEC/DECnet/PhaseIV/maintop30.txt

MOP seems to consist of three parts, loopback testing, remote dumping/loading of
system and remote console. Somewhere (written for the linux-vax project)
there are userland tools which perform some of these operations.

I've been asked by someone (at a talk I was giving on Linux DECnet) about
the possibility of having a MOP remote console client which runs on Linux
to control a terminal server which requires this, so I'm looking into the
possibilites of this. Also I have started to put hooks in the raw socket
layer of the Linux DECnet code for MOP, but much work needs to be done
before it will be useful.

If anyone is interested in taking this further, plese let me know or send
mail to the linux-decnet list at dreamtime.org. The linux-decnet project
home page is at http://www.sucs.swan.ac.uk/~rohan/DECnet/index.html

Steve.

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