Date   : Thu, 12 Mar 2009 18:58:01 +0000
From   : jgh@... (Jonathan Graham Harston)
Subject: Back from Byte-Back!

Chris Johns wrote:
> > > Jonathan Graham Harston wrote:
> > Refering to <http://mdfs.net/User/JGH/Docs/AFE/Network> I usually
> 
> How did you manage to get network 2 (assuming that's network 2 in the
> NetFS/AUN sense) to be on the ethernet? Networks 1-127 were used for
> Econet, 128up for ethernet.
 
I was definitely able to do it, for over a year while I was working
at AFE. Al the documents in the Docs/AFE directory above were
written at the actual time.
 
There is the complete possibility that our setup was nonstandard in
lots of ways, but station 236 was definitely on network 2 on the
econet side and network 3 on the ethernet side. A lot of what we
did was before Acorn had produced any documentation to tell what we
should be doing, so for network numbers we probably just kept
incrementing them as we went.
 
I also had to do a lot of software patching to things to get them
to work. I rewrote great chunks of !MailMan and parts of the unix
mailer demon just to get them functionally usable (eg, standard
!MailMan can only mail text files).
 
> Given 2.236 was a Unix server, I would be suprised if it ran the !Gateway
> that came with the AUN package.
 
That could well be it. It ran various RiscIX serving demons and it
was probably a unix packet forwarder that acted as a gateway.
 
> > To remotely administer the printer servers on stations 2.125 and
> > 2.126 I ran L4FS fileserver on them as well, with the whole disk
> 
> I would be very suprised if you could *I AM to either of them from the
> beeb. From the arc, yes; however it's possible there was a unix version
> of gateway that actually worked as a bridge.
 
I could, I regularly logged on with ANFS 4.25 on the BBC Master
with *I AM 2.125 SYST <passwd>. As you say (it's 16 years ago now)
the gateway could well have been running on RiscIX.
 
> > We definitely had a system that routed NetFS-over-Econet to and
> > from NetFS-over-Ethernet.
> 
> For 8 bit machines? To route from NetFS-over-Econet to
> NetFS-over-Ethernet (IP), the Econet only machine uses EconetA, and does
> NetFS-over-IP-over-Econet.
 
A Econet-only RISC OS machine uses NetFS-over-Econet by sending
standard NetFS transactions bundled up in standard Econet packets.
I've got the netmon logs to prove it! Buried deep within
http://mdfs.net/Mirror/Disk/JGH/Econet1/NetData is a Master 128 at
station 106 logging onto station 2.126, accessed via the econet-
ethernet gateway on station 3.236/2.236.
 
(Run http://mdfs.net/Mirror/Disk/JGH/Econet1/Mon2 with SHIFT held
down to load NetData and display its contents.)
 
> The 8bit NFS can't do this, so are limited to talking to what they can
> see via the econet(s).
 
Yes, and one of the things they can see via the Econets is station
236 which passed NetFS-over-Econet packets over to
NetFS-over-Ethernet and vice versa.
 
-- 
J.G.Harston - jgh@...                - mdfs.net/User/JGH
BBC BASIC for Windows and Internationalisation
  See http://mdfs.net/Software/BBCBasic/Windows/ProgTips