[Simh] VAX XQ and wireless networking

[Gary Lee Phillips]

I should have mentioned that I've tried setting up bridging and taptap
without success when using the wireless interface. I use it on my
desktop PCs (wired ethernet and Ubuntu) where it works OK though it's
very cumbersome to start up and shut down.

I thought the main advantage of a bridge was the fact that it lets the
host and the emulated machine speak directly to one another via
network packets, and that's a feature I don't really need in this
case. Using the serial port emulation with a VT100 emulation over a
tcp/ip socket is adequate and works well.

On the desktop machines, the taptap module seems to have a tendency to
"hang" on shutdown, even though the SIMH emulation has been closed
down normally. The unreleased bridge port will keep the entire host
from shutting down and requires a forced power off, which isn't very
nice.

On 11/17/12, Dan Gahlinger <dgahling at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> It works...use the TUN interface and the bridging, works just fine.
> Dan.
>
>> Date: Sat, 17 Nov 2012 14:14:24 -0600
>> From: tivo.overo at gmail.com
>> To: simh at trailing-edge.com
>> Subject: [Simh] VAX XQ and wireless networking
>>
>> 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.
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>