[Simh] Vax network 'deaf' on Solaris 10 Sparc

[Paul Hannington]

Hi folks

I'm having a very frustrating time getting the networking to function for a vax build on Solaris 10, on a Sparc platform.

The build is fine, using libpcap 0.9.8. I have bound the vax xq card to an unused network port which is ifconfig'g to a different address to the vax configured address. OpenVMS TCP/IP services are configured pretty much as per Wherry.

Vax boots fine and reports all network services have started correctly (ftp and telnet at this stage). But I cannot telnet to the vax address, receiving a connect failure message. Ftp and ping are likewise unresponsive.

If I 'ping' from the vax to any other address on the subnet, ping reports all packets lost. To understand what's happening, I am sniffing the traffic using both snooping the vax interface on the host machine, sniffing the switch port, and snooping on the destination machine.

The vax is correctly issuing the ICMP ECHO REQUEST packet, which is responded to with the RESPONSE packet from the target machine. The target machine snooping confirms both the request, response and correct ip and mac addresses present in all traffic. The host machine is similar - right addresses, right mac's, right packets. 

The vax however remains 'deaf' to it all and thinks all packets are lost.

Any ideas on making this work on Solaris? Even a clue as to where in the hosts stack things may not be passing to the vax. I have tried this both as vax alone, and also as vax + manually placing the card into promiscuous mode (which of course happens when snooping the interface), in case the issue was with libpcap not selecting promiscuous mode correctly.

Help, anybody???


Paul Hannington