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- June 30, 1991
-
- By Mike Bilow, N1BEE,
- For GRINOS/GRINOS-S KA9Q 910618/PA0GRI 910625v1.7a/N1BEE 910630v0.4ß
-
-
- All users of GRINOS/GRINOS-S are invited to join the grinos@n1bee
- mailing list. This is what I use to distribute advisories and updates.
- There is no requirement that you actually use GRINOS in order to join the
- mailing list. Just send a message to n1bee@n1bee and you will be added.
-
-
- I. KA9Q/PA0GRI changes
-
- This release of GRINOS uses KA9Q 910618 as its base instead of 910605.
- Most of the changes are of little or no importance to ordinary users. The
- experimental Kantor model for Internet wormholes between NET/ROM points is
- now implemented using Anders Klemets' code as the "axip" interface. Since
- no one is going to use it locally, I would have taken it out, but there is
- no way to do that easily, so we are going to have to let it consume memory
- for the time being.
-
- There are extensive bug-fix revisions to the mailbox code. The local
- chat functions should now work when initiated at the mailbox. (This was a
- result of a timer being set for two minutes instead of two seconds.) Users
- of the forwarding functions that allow mail handling between NOS and W0RLI
- or other conventional packet BBSs will also see major changes.
-
- KA9Q seems to have taken another stab at getting TIP and PPP to work,
- although I would consider them highly suspect.
-
-
- II. N1BEE changes
-
- A. Bug fixes and default modifications
-
- The ttylink screens have been fixed. Two users of ttylink in this
- version of NOS who are communicating will see identical top windows on
- their screens, except that each will see outgoing text in high intensity
- and incoming text in normal intensity, which was the original intent.
- The problem may actually have been associated with a documented bug in
- the Borland C++ 2.0 compiler run-time libraries. It has now been fixed
- by explicitly calling clreol() at the necessary points. (Reported by
- KA1MF and WA1OAJ.)
-
-
- B. New features
-
- I have extensively modified the "ax25 heard" functions. Because of the
- very large amount of memory consumed by the logging of calls heard, it is
- important to minimize waste. Wide area stations, especially switches, pick
- up error frames quite often that have corrupted callsign fields. Issuing
- the "ax25 heard" command (or the J command from telnet) on the wb6nil switch
- will dump pages and pages of such junk calls, all of it using up memory.
- I have now implemented code that prevents calls from being added to the
- heard lists unless they consist entirely of upper case letters, digits, or
- spaces. This simple filtering eliminates about 90% of the junk.
-
- Unknown to most users, NOS maintains a log of callsigns to which frames
- are directed, in addition to those from which frames are transmitted. One
- good reason that this is not generally known is because there is no way to
- access this list, and it is never actually used for anything. I have enabled
- a new command "ax25 hearddest" that dumps this list on the display in a format
- similar to that used by the "ax25 heard" command.
-
- Still, most users probably do not need the heard lists at all. Because
- there are future plans and stubs of routines to use the lists for routing
- information, I have decided not to disable this feature. I have added a
- new command "ax25 filter" that takes a bit mask argument that will inhibit
- the logging of calls heard, but this command defaults to logging of both
- source and destination calls enabled ("ax25 filter 0") for compatibility.
- Users can disable either logging of source calls ("ax25 filter 1"),
- destination calls ("ax25 filter 2"), or both ("ax25 filter 3").
-
- As an accidental side effect of this new command, the shorthand "ax f"
- command will now map as "ax25 filter" instead of "ax25 flush"; users of the
- "ax f" command should type at least one more letter to correctly access the
- old "ax25 flush" command.
-
-
- III. Future plans
-
- KA1MF suggests allowing commands which require the address of a control
- block (such as "tcp kick" or "tcp status <tcbaddr>") to take a four character
- short form of the address, since the memory allocator guarantees that the
- last four charcaters are always "0008" anyway. This sounds like a good idea,
- and it will be in the code as soon as I can get to it.
-
-