[Info-vax] Cutting down on routing nodes

[John Wallace]

On Aug 1, 6:04 pm, CY <christ... at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Well, not quite sure what you're trying to do, though I doubt you really
> > want to turn your routing nodes loose (;-))... ("lose" and "loose" are
> > often confused.)
>
> Hehe, well, think the idea of what is going to happen came across
> anyway. ;)
>
> What im figuering about is (yes I tested without routers and it works
> nice) how to easy see all (not just known nodes) in an area (nr 5 in
> my case, the last to be put to sleep)
> to prevent (me or someone else) to take 5.9 because thats free, its an
> old machine, and another guy had the same brilliant idea, been there -
> done that, same MAC address on a flat (not swithced network +800 nodes
> at that time) is a bit messy to find! so the routing IV was the point
> where we updated the NCP list and could see of a new node (5.123 is
> always suspicious) came up... eaven the decserver100/200 without
> decnet where registerd there for MOP and remote access.
>
> Got one more week before the plant starts up again, and should I
> reconf/install an routing IV on the existing systems then it should be
> now... othervise the last stop that made this possible until now was
> 2001 or something... and no I dont want to revive the uVAXII with its
> nice RD54 disks or keeping the PDP 11/84 running for this, thank good
> we didnt go phase V all the way anyhow... I cant find a thing on
> machines with V... if my memory serves me: sho kno links and other
> nice stuff is not wat it was... so I downgraded...
>
> Well monday Ill try that NCP command someone said was great, lets see
> what that does...
>
> Just a sethost will do the same to check if its alive, but DJD thats
> an good ieda for a little DCL, going 1-255 once a day and on demand to
> produce an textfile with active nodes.... will think and test if it
> laggs
>
> //CY

Rather than (or as well as???) polling 1-255, you might want to look
into
NCP> SET MODULE CONFIG KNOWN CIRCUIT SURVEILLANCE ENABLED
and the related SHOW commands which show the contents of the SYSID
database.

Any decent DEC device will multicast its SYSID periodically, the
details will be stored in the SYSID database, and you can check that
even if the system in question isn't up or isn't reachable.

Some kit such as terminal servers might have a DECnet database entry
just to e.g. map a node name to a MAC address so you can go NCP>
CONNECT NODE abc or similar.

In cases like that, the box may never be reachable by DECnet, so the
value of a reachability test to see whether an address is "in use"
depends on what you mean by "in use".