[Simh] VMS/VDE: Almost there

[Mark Pizzolato - Info Comm]

On Sunday, October 4, 2015 at 9:44 PM, Zachary Kline wrote:
> I’m 98% of the way there with the bridged VDE setup mentioned in my
> earlier thread. I appreciate all the help from folks here, and wonder if
> anybody might have ideas for debugging some hiccups.
> My VAX gets an IP address from the router, but can’t seem to ping it, nor any
> other addresses. DNS doesn’t work. Note that I’m not quite sure how to tell
> TCPIP services to get the name servers via DHCP.
> I’m running the VDE switch as root, configured a bogus domain in TCPIP
> configuration, and the bridge seems to be working as designed.
> 
> Could this be a case of the wifi router dropping packets because of the wrong
> mac address? I can’t ping or connect to the VAX from the host, either, it just
> times out.
> 
> I’m not sure what might help debug this, but am happy to supply any info.
> Thanks,
> Zack.

Well I'm not sure you're actually pursuing the best approach to get your vax simulator on your WiFi connected host OS X system to talk via IP.

I originally suggested you explore VDE networking since I vaguely remembered something about NAT being available.  Jordi's original VDE work didn't need NAT and he apparently hadn't explored beyond the very good write-up he did for bridged networking.  While exploring this problem and thinking about how to add NAT internally to the Ethernet layer I ran into "slirpvde".  This program is part of the vde2 package you've now got available on your host system.  

I've never actually used VDE beyond the basic testing that Jordi did for a bridged network configuration and I don't have an IP stack installed on my test VMS disk configurations.  Therefore, I don't really have the test config to try and work out the details myself.  If you or someone else can work out how to get NAT working with slirpvde, I'm pretty sure that I can take the resulting information and hide all of the details under the covers within the simulator and allow you to say: "attach xq NAT{:extra-optional-parameters}" and just have it work.

I asked Jordi to explore this as well, but if you come up with a minimal set of configuration steps I'll make the change to the simulator to simplify things.

- Mark