[Simh] Vax.exe emulator and Multinet network configuring

[Paul Koning]

> On May 9, 2019, at 3:20 PM, Hittner, David T [US] (MS) <david.hittner at ngc.com> wrote:
> 
> (It's been a long time since I've played with SMAC on wireless. I did get it to work, but it wasn't worth the pain to me, so I upgraded to DECNET/OSI non-compatibility mode.)
> 
> IIRC, when you start DECNET IV, it sends a broadcast packet to see if there is an address collision with the hard-coded DECNET IV address before it changes the MAC to the DECNET IV MAC. 

That's not in any DECnet standard.  It may be someone did that, and it wouldn't be a bad idea to do so.

BTW, some NICs allow enabling multiple individual addresses and choosing which one you want.  DEC made that standard fairly early on, once it became clear that combining LAT and DECnet on a single interface was a pain.  DEUNA doesn't do this, DEQNA does, and all the DEC single-chip Ethernet interfaces support it.  On such interfaces you'd use the aa-04 address for DECnet and the "hardware address" for other things.

SIMH can do this just fine given that the Ethernet libraries it uses can do it.

	paul