[Info-vax] probably a simple issue...

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2014-02-16 01:29:50 +0000, cyberdefensedave at gmail.com said:

> I'm sure one of you gurus will point out the error of my ways...

You chose the default DECnet downgrade, eh?   Whoops.   If it's new 
enough to have a menu in the installation environment, boot the OpenVMS 
installation disk, select the option to remove products, select DECnet 
Phase V / DECnet-Plus / DECnet-OSI as your target and allow the product 
to be removed, then select the product installation option, select 
DECnet Phase IV and allow that to be installed, and reboot.   (I don't 
remember the DECnet upgrade sequence for OpenVMS VAX and for the older 
releases off-hand, and would have to look around for how to remove 
Phase V and upgrade to Phase IV.  Though based on 
<http://h71000.www7.hp.com/doc/73final/6630/6630pro_010.html> it looks 
to be similar and PCSI-based.)

This removal-install sequence will upgrade you to a DECnet 
configuration that requires far less memory, has a streamlined command 
interface, and generally works better for systems with limited physical 
memory and processor resources such as early Alpha systems and most 
OpenVMS VAX systems.   (Based on your version, I'm going to assume 
OpenVMS VAX.)   The DECnet-Plus Phase V network downgrade — the default 
for installations, unfortunately — tends to consume a fair chunk of 
system memory and has features such as an EMA-compliant command-based 
management interface — when very few folks have used or even seen the 
rest of EMA in decades.

As for your current question 
<http://labs.hoffmanlabs.com/vmsfaq/vmsfaq.PDF> and search for the 
section

"15.3.2 What does "failure on back translate address request" mean?

The error message:
           BCKTRNSFAIL, failure on the back translate address request
...."


All that written, there are reasons to use DECnet-Plus / DECnet/OSI / 
Phase V: you need DECnet over IP, or if you want HP support for DECnet 
and don't want to pay for extra support costs of the the DECnet Phase V 
upgrade, or if you want to experiment with ~1990 networking and DEC 
Enterprise Management Architecture (EMA) and with what DEC thought 
(hoped? wanted?) distributed director-entity distributed management 
would look like in the 1990s.  
<ftp://ftp.iks-jena.de/mitarb/lutz/standards/DEC/entity_model_v1.0.0.ps.gz> 
  The DECnet-Plus / DECnet/OSI / Phase V NCL tool is one of the last 
surviving pieces of that time.

The astute reader will notice I'm not a huge fan of DECnet-Plus.  Yes, 
it works.  Yes, it's useful.  No, I don't usually use it — the OSI 
world that it was designed and built for never really came to pass — 
DECnet over IP or the support contract details are among the few 
(recent, current) reasons to choose DECnet-Plus over Phase IV.  DECnet 
Phase IV is just lighter, and simpler (at least for me) to deal with.

In general, there's very little involving DECnet or OpenVMS V7.3 hasn't 
been asked before, either.  Beyond the (now ancient) OpenVMS FAQ, the 
newsgroup archives accessible via Google Groups search offers a whole 
pile of information, and these details are NOT indexed in Google (in 
the main search engine), or in Bing, DuckDuckGo, Blekko or other search 
engines.  The Google Groups search engine is an excellent resource, 
when it's working right.

FWIW (as it's likely going to involve your current or some future 
clustering question Real Soon Now), here 
<http://labs.hoffmanlabs.com/node/169> is the core list of files that 
should be shared in a cluster.  It's common for some of these to be 
missed when setting up a cluster, and things can get weird or 
inconsistent, or access can be unexpectedly allowed or denied based on 
the binary identifier values and binary UIC values — when those are not 
maintained consistently across all hosts in the cluster.

-- 
Pure Personal Opinion | HoffmanLabs LLC