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

[Johnny Billquist]

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

I usually try to avoid spamming lists with release announcements,
and the previous announcement was only a month ago, so I apologize
in advance for the noise.

However, I have a really good reason for this announcement. In the last
few days I identified a bug within RSX, that has been latent for
many years, but which gets activated when TCP/IP is installed.

Because of this, I've cut a new distribution of BQTCP, which now also
includes some patches to RSX, which I really implore everyone to
install.


Highlights:

- Stability and reliability improvements in RSX.
- Improved stability of Multinet.
- Improved stability of MAILD.



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


RSX:
- The MCR REMOVE command have an interaction with the IP: device driver,
which have a bug. Traditionally, the IP: device driver was for the
IP11 device, which I doubt anyone have used in many years, so this
bug have probably been around a long time without detection.
The result of it is that low core and pool will get corrupted when
giving the REMOVE command, and IP: exists.
BQTCP now includes an optional "patch RSX" section in IPGEN, which
will install a new version of MCR on the system. This is only needed
to be run once, as the patching is installing new tasks, and
changing the bootable image to use these new tasks, which is a more
permanent change.

Along with the fix for the memory corruption issues, the new version
of MCR will also fix a few other issues that people might or might
not have noticed. There is some more details in the BQTCP
documentation.



Multinet:
- Some transmit errors should restart the link, but this was not done.
Fixed now.



MAILD:
- Added paging to mail reader.
- Improved remote node system type detection for DECnet.
- Improved the memory layout of MAILD, to avoid some crash situation.



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


Johnny