## Digital Equipment Corporation Networking Methods

These are networking methods associated with Digital Equipment Corporation networks and hosts.

Contents:

- SuperLAT
- DECnet / PATHWORKS
- TES32

Note: All the third-party products discussed here have been discontinued and are no longer commercially available. None of them are compatible with any version of Windows newer than Windows Server 2003.

Due to unclear licensing, support for SuperLAT and TES32 is no longer included by default as of Kermit 95 version 3.0. Support may return in a future release, but in the meantime you can compile Kermit 95 from source yourself if you need it.

### SuperLAT

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This section applies to Windows 95 and NT only; the OS/2 version does not support SuperLAT, but it does support PATHWORKS via SET NETWORK TYPE DECNET (see OS/2 Specifics of Kermit 95 ).

SuperLAT(TM) was a commercial product from Meridian Technology Corporation, formerly at 11 McBride Corporate Center Drive, Suite 250, Chesterfield MO 63005-1407 USA:

      Web:   http://www.meridiantc.com/ (via archive.org)

Meridian Technology discontinued all sales and support for SuperLAT on 31 December 2000 and offered source code to customers with the required LAT patent licenses for self-support purposes.

SuperLAT provides LAT (Local Area Transport) service to Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) VMS or other hosts that support it, as well as to LAT-based DECservers, e.g. for shared dialout modem access. You can make SuperLAT connections from Kermit 95 if you have SuperLAT installed on your Windows 95 or NT system. The method is as follows:

      SET NETWORK TYPE SUPERLAT
      SET HOST service-name [ password ]

where service-name is normally the DECnet host (node) name of the system you are connecting to. It can also be a node/port combination (no spaces), with a (forward) slash (no spaces) separating the node and port designations, for example to access a specific modem port on a DECserver. If the service is password-protected, you must also include a password after the service-name or node/port. Examples:

      SET HOST OOFAVAX         ; Service name
      SET HOST OOFAVAX SECRET  ; Service name with password
      SET HOST LATBOX/3        ; Serial Port 3 on LATBOX
      SET HOST LATBOX/3 SECRET ; Serial Port 3 on LATBOX with password

WARNING: Uploading files on a LAT connection is problematic due to intrinsic limitations of LAT buffering. Using 90-byte packets and 1 window slot seems to work in most cases (tell VMS C-Kermit to "set receive packet-length 90"); greater lengths tend to hang the VMS session. Downloads can use any packet length or window size. WARNING: Do NOT tell VMS or VMS C-Kermit to disable flow control. VMS C-Kermit MUST have "set flow xon/xoff".

### DECnet / PATHWORKS

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This section applies to 32bit Windows 95, NT, 2000, XP, Server 2003, and OS/2 on x86 and Alpha CPUs only.

PATHWORKS is a networking package for PCs formerly available from Digital Equipment Corporation, later Compaq and then HP. It was also once known as DECNET/DOS. Kermit has supported this networking method in OS/2 since the mid 90s; as of version 1.1.13 (June 1997), K95 supports it in Windows 95 and NT too. In Windows 95 and NT, Digital PATHWORKS-32 V7.0 or later is required. In OS/2, PATHWORKS 2.0 or higher can be used. The final release of PATHWORKS-32 for Windows was version 7.4 released in 2004.

If you have PATHWORKS installed on your PC, you can use "set network type pathworks" and then "set host xxx", where xxx is a DECnet node name or address.

WARNING: When you give a SET HOST command, it can not be interrupted. If the host is not available, it might take a long time for PATHWORKS to time out and return control to K95.

In your SET NETWORK TYPE PATHWORKS command, you can specify whether to make a LAT (local area) or CTERM (wide area) connection:

`SET NETWORK TYPE { PATHWORKS, DECNET } [ { CTERM, LAT } ]`
  Choose PATHWORKS as the network type. DECNET is a synonym for PATHWORKS. If you don't specify a protocol, LAT is used. CTERM is not available in Kermit/2.

So a complete sequence might be:

      SET NETWORK TYPE PATHWORKS LAT   ; Choose PATHWORKS networking
      SET HOST CHEMVAX                 ; Make a connection to node CHEMVAX
      CONNECT                          ; Enter the terminal window

If you know you have some form of LAT installed on your PC, but you don't know which one:

      SET NETWORK TYPE SUPERLAT
      IF FAIL SET NETWORK TYPE PATHWORKS LAT
      IF FAIL END 1 Sorry - No LAT installed here.
      SET HOST ...

### TES32

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This section applies to Windows 95/98/ME only. The OS/2 version of C-Kermit does not support TES32, and TES32 is not available for Windows NT, Windows 2000 or newer.

The TES networking method (virtual terminal service to VMS hosts over Novell networks) is supported as of version 1.1.8 (November 1996) via SET NETWORK TYPE TES32, if you have the TES32 product, and the corresponding server on your VMS host. These were products of InterConnections Inc / Emulex and were discontinued sometime at the end of the 90s. More info at:

      http://www.emulex.com/leverage/index.html (via archive.org)

In fact, TES connections were also supported prior to this version 1.1.8, since TES is accessed through the same interface as SuperLAT. TES32 is not mentioned in the various Dialer dialog boxes; just choose SuperLAT wherever you need to use TES32.

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