[Coco] ka9q was Re: Coco Contiki

[Gene Heskett]

On Wednesday 05 March 2008, Willard Goosey wrote:
>On Fri, Feb 29, 2008 at 06:42:48AM -0500, Gene Heskett wrote:
>
>Gaah, sorry it took so long to get back to this.  Real Life sucks some
>times. :-(
>
>> I'd been using Supercom-2.3 for that, I used it years ago to connect to my
>> amiga and conduct speed tests while building rzsz-3.36 for us.  The
>> connection then was bulletproof.
>
>Yeah, I think Supercom works too.
>
>> >As a good first test, net (the ka9q binary) can indeed telnet to
>> >itself and ftp to itself.  It is, however, very very slow.
>>
>> You are telnetting?  To an FQDN, or an arbitrary IP address?
>
>Either, as long as its on the same machine. :-)  The ip address and
>the FQDN are set in KA9Q's startup.net file, which also starts various
>(small) servers.  KA9Q can successfully telnet to its own server.
>
>None of the KA9Q binaries have "ping" compiled in,
>which makes debugging harder.  It does, however, have an echo server,
>and I've been able to ping it from the linux box.  Getting back about
>1 out of 10 packets. :-(
>
>> ISTR I was using mgetty on this box.  But that's a very hazy
>> memory. And I do not now see any such thing in my kmenu's.
>
>agetty here.  I need to make sure it's putting the serial port into a
>sane mode.
>
>> >Using net.trace
>>
>> This is on the coco?
>
>Yep.  The KA9Q binary had to be split up into several, with different
>commands.  They all have telnet.  "Net" has ftp and the servers.
>"net.trace" has ipstat and tcpstat.  "net.smtp" has a baby sendmail.
>
>> >Oddly enough, ifconfig on the linux side shows no errors, but a
>> >smaller number of packets transmitted & received.  Hummm.
>
>I think part of that is, the (impatient) user keeps killing
>connections on one machine, and then the other machine gets a packet
>through. :-)
>
>> We have crc16, and crc32, and either needs to be built with the same seed
>> number on both ends.
>
>The only thing I've found about it is the linux slip driver option for
>6-bit encapsulation, and I don't think that's the problem.
>
>> >Anyway, tonight I'm going to start by debugging slip.login.
>
>Which I'm still not done with.... I've fixed several problems with
>this script without really improving the SLIP connection.  Still, 50%
>or more packets have checksum errors on the CoCo. :-(
>
>> What package is that in, I do not have it here (F8 install)
>
>Sliplogin seems to have been dropped from Slackware, I'm not sure what
>replaced it.  Which is probably a good choice, as it has given me
>fits!  I'm currently very suspicious of the "route" commands it builts
>up with sed & awk..., since "arp" reports that the CoCo is connected
>to eth0....
>
>I'm also going to drop the speed.  9600 may simply be too much for
>KA9Q to keep up with, when I don't have the *CART lines on my MPI
>strapped together.
>
That will kill you, do it ASAP, strap all cart ports pin 8's together.

>Hell, at least I'm learning more about IP networking.  A guy could
>wish a 300-level CS course on networking would talk more about IP than
>the ISO 7-layer model.... Blaeah!

Yeah, but that was back in CS 101. :)  And I missed it just like you did.  The 
amiga, and now linux, have taught me a lot.  But its not what I use everyday, 
cuz once I get something working, I don't mess with it, and that leads to 
memory loss at my years cuz its not being used.  Couple that with a basic old 
farts laziness, where something I need to do all the time needs done 
frequently, I'll commit it to a bash script and then let cron run it so its 
another thing I don't have to remember.  And I've looked at the script 2 
years later and it takes 10 minutes to figure out just what the heck was I 
trying to do.

My latest sin in that dept is a daily spam trainer session, where all I have 
to do now is drop an errant mail in the ham or spam folders & forget about 
it, cron will run it sometime in the morning hours and then delete the spam, 
leaving the ham for me to manually drag & drop into the right folder.  This 
is also preceeded by a cron driven update of the spamassassin rules & 
generally works fairly well.  There are of course ownership issues in doing 
it the way I do it cuz most of this stuff is run as an unprivileged user, but 
I run as root, so the scripts have to manage those details.  I'm surrounded 
by sandboxes so to speak.

>Willard

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Herth's Law:
	He who turns the other cheek too far gets it in the neck.