[Simh] VAX XQ and wireless networking

[Gary Lee Phillips]

Is this even possible? I have SIMH 3.9 on Linux Mint 12, running the
VAX with OpenVMS 7.3. It works great, except for networking. The
hardware is ASUS EeePC with Atheros AR5001 wireless network adapter
and Atheros L2 Fast Ethernet adapter.

I have libpcap version 1.1.1 (which is also callable as version 0.8)
installed on Linux. The VAX module was compiled with networking
enabled.

The configuration file has an "attach xq0 wlan0" or "attach xq0 eth0"
depending on which interface I'm trying to use. With the wired
ethernet (eth0) I am able to use both TCP/IP and DECNET Plus. With the
wireless (wlan0) neither one works.

I've tried disabling the DECNET IV compatibility mode, which was
recommended in one source for wireless compatibility, and also tried
adding "set xq xx-yy-zz-aa-bb-cc" (with the actual MAC address of the
wireless adapter) to the configuration. The first did nothing I could
discern, and the second generated an error message during startup of
the SIMH module, saying that the MAC address was already in use and
could not be assigned.

Obviously the workaround is to use a cabled connection when the VAX
emulator is needed, but this isn't very practical in most cases. Is
there any other possibility I've overlooked?

I notice that this is a frequently found question when using Google to
look for answers, but I found no responses other than the two
solutions mentioned above. I suppose a different network card
emulation for VAX could make the wi-fi adapter look like a normal
ethernet interface, but apparently that hasn't been done yet and it's
probably beyond my very rudimentary C coding abilities.