Date   : Thu, 30 Nov 2006 11:43:45 -0000
From   : BBCMailingList@... (Ian Wolstenholme)
Subject: Econet bits and bobs....

Well done, always nice to hear from another convert
to Econet!

The BBC Model B level 1 file server is written in BASIC.
It is fairly primitive, there is no concept of user names
or passwords, hierarchical directory structure or access
restrictions on files or user free space.  Basically it just
"shares" whatever DFS disc happens to be in the
drive connected to the Beeb running the server.

Illustrated guide to using Level 1 here:

http://www.beebmaster.co.uk/Econet/Level1FS.html

One of the biggest problems with L1 (apart from the
general lack of functions) is that it doesn't like ANFS
because ANFS sends all its commands to the file
server in lower case (so when you shift-BREAK a
Master 128, the string "*i . boot" gets sent to the
server rather than "*I . BOOT" or even "*I AM BOOT")

To get round this I modified the L1 code to convert
any command received from a user station by the
server into upper case.  This is here as a tokenised
BBC BASIC file:

http://www.beebmaster.co.uk/downloads/L1mod.zip

The best documents to look at for detailed information
about how Econet works in terms of all the operating
system calls and details of the Econet protocols are
the Econet Advanced User Guide, the early Econet 
System User Guide (which covers the Acorn System,
Atom & BBC B) and chapter 10 of the SJ MDFS manual,
all of which should be available@...

"NOTIFY" is in fact a fairly simple OSWORD call implemented
in NFS/ANFS.  You don't need a file server to do a NOTIFY,
you can do it from BASIC from any networked Beeb without
being logged on.

It's OSWORD &14 with command code 1.

The parameter block can be up to 250 bytes (or 128
bytes if using a second processor) as follows:

0 - Command code (1 for send message)
1 & 2 - Destination station (net number, station number)
3 onwards - message terminated with CR or zero.

Best wishes,



Ian


----- Original Message -----
From: BRAHMS [mailto:dominic@...]
To: bbc-micro@...
Sent: Mon, 27 Nov 2006 19:39:10 -0000
Subject: [BBC-Micro] Econet bits and bobs....

I've now got my Econet (2 machines) Working. (At least TRANS and RECV listings
from the Advanced Econet Guide work!)

Does anybody have a copy of Level 1 server to run on my BBC? (The only download
links I can find all go to 8bs!) I'd like at least to get hold of REMOTE
and NOTIFY for testing purposes.

Does anybody have any low - level documentation of how the various protocols
work? I've read throught he various econet installation guides but can't
find any meaty documentation esp. on how the file transfer stuff works.

Cheers

Doom