[Simh] Announcing TCP/IP for RSX-11M-PLUS

Johnny Billquist bqt at softjar.se
Tue Jan 9 19:30:38 EST 2018


Time for a new release announcement of TCP/IP for RSX-11M-PLUS.

This release contains a lot of fixes and improvements in many areas. 
There are a couple of very serious bugs in TCP that is fixed in this 
release which is why I really encourage people to upgrade. (They do not 
happen often, but if they happen, they have a high chance of crashing 
the system.)


Highlights:

- Stability and reliability improvements in TCP.
- Improved DHCP
- Improved TELNETD
- Improved FTP(D)
- Improved HTTPD
- Improved MAIL(D)
- Improved Multinet


Detailed information on things that have been done since the last release:


Installation process:
- The IPGEN script now optionally cleans up the disk after installation.


TCP:
- Bugfix in TCP slow start window computation in combination with TCP 
RTT calculation. If the RTT was above mininum, the slow start window 
never grew.
- Changed TCP Fin-Wait-2 state to not reset timer if unexpected packets 
are received.
- Stop slow timer at TCP close, so that it can be re-primed with an 
appropriate timeout.
- Added proper handling of SYN packets at the closing stages of a 
socket. They should always cause RST packets.
- Improved handling of the slow timer at the closing stages of sockets. 
Sending packets at those stages should not stop the timer.
- Add handling of two TCP SYN packets comes in from same address/port to 
same address/port but with different sequence numbers. Second req. will 
be reset immediately.
- Improve handling of failed daemon activations from TCP.
- Bugfix. If several creates were done for the same TCP connection, the 
stack got corrupted.
- Bugfix in IO.CON. It could create a new connection for an already 
existing one.
- Bugfix. If a read from TCP give error result, we should not unblock 
user ASTs.
- Corrected AST block setup in TCP.
- Add PU.NBL option for non-blocking writes to TCP.
- Bugfix in TCP. IO.SXS, IO.SRS and IO.SSS was not working.


IFCONFIG:
- Disallow changing interface parameters on a running interface.


DHCP:
- Corrected bug in DHCP, where lease time was computed as a signed number.


TELNETD:
- Improve TELNETD connection tracking and disconnection handling.
- Bugfix in TELNETD. If socket create failed, TELNETD could go catatonic.
- Improved telnetd accept handling.


FTP(D):
- Bugfix for FTP, which caused RSX and block mode transfers to sometimes 
fail.
- Improved RSX mode FTP transfer mode under some circumstances.
- Enable ftp to put block files.


HTTP:
- Bugfix in HTTPD. WWW.B2S failed to include BQTLIB.B2S, and therefore 
missed function prototypes causing function to be called the wrong way 
in the main function.
- Improve error handling for HTTPD when running CGI scripts.
- Improved handling of CGI interface in WWW.


MAILD:
- Improved mail headers for MAIL11 received mails.
- Improve MAILD handling of text/plan with format=flow
- Add user-agent header to composed mails.
- Add MIME headers to mail sent over smtp.
- Improved logging in MAILD.
- Added handling of mail address loops in MAILD.
- Added mail forwarding for MAILD.
- Improved error handling in MAILD mail delivery.
- Improve MAILD client RMS handling.
- Bugfix in MAILD. For MAIL11, VMS systems can send empty lines that 
MAILD interpreted as end of mail. Fixed now.
- Fix mail processing. SMTP did not reject invalid local addresses. SMTP 
now rejects destinations on other hosts, as we do not allow relaying.
- Corrected mail printouts which skipped empty lines.
- Added FILE command to mail client.


Multinet:
- Improve Multinet handling of failing lines.


RMD:
- Added more information on the RMD network page.


As usual, the distribution is available from:
ftp://mim.update.uu.se/bqtcp.dsk
ftp://mim.update.uu.se/bqtcp.tap
ftp://ftp.update.uu.se/pub/pdp11/rsx/tcpip/tcpip.dsk

The documentation is also available through ftp on Mim, or also at 
http://mim.update.uu.se/tcpipdoc

The firewall for Mim have now been removed, so no need for the alternate 
ports, but Mim is still listening to the alternate ports as well.
ftp: 10021
telnet: 10023


As a final word about this release. As always things progress with time, 
but I think it's safe to say by now that BQTCP is now a very stable 
TCP/IP with almost all features one can expect. There might always be 
some more work on the lower level protocols, but at this point, expect 
that most work and updates will be more and more on various daemons and 
clients.
If there is anything in particular anyone is looking for, let me know.

	Johnny

-- 
Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                   ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se             ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol


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