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- Kermit-11 under IAS
- 17-Sep-1985
- Bruce C. Wright
-
- I. Abstract
-
- Kermit is a program developed at Columbia University for
- communication between computers using asynchronous ASCII
- protocols. It is designed to be implementable under a
- wide variety of machines and operating systems.
-
- This document describes some of the features and restrictions
- of Kermit running under the IAS operating system. The IAS
- version of Kermit is a modification of the RSX-11 version of
- Kermit, but because of differences in the operating systems
- not all of the features of RSX Kermit are currently available
- under IAS Kermit.
-
- II. Supported features
-
- IAS Kermit supports most of the features of RSX Kermit:
-
- o file transfers
- o remote and local commands
- o spawning installed tasks
- o dial-out lines
- o extensive help facility
-
- Some of these features involve procedures not required under
- RSX, because of the restrictions placed by the timesharing
- executive:
-
- 1) Dial-out lines must not be interactive terminals.
- That is, if you are going to use a line as a dial-
- out line, you must not allocate it to PDS or SCI.
-
- 2) Spawning installed tasks is currently done via a
- SPWN$ directive rather than via RUN$T. Therefore,
- anyone wanting to spawn installed tasks must have
- the PR.RTC (real-time) privilege. A workaround is
- to exit from Kermit, run the program, and then
- run Kermit again. Kermit will first try to run an
- installed task named $$$xxx, where xxx is the system
- command requested; if that fails, Kermit will try
- to run an installed task named ...xxx.
-
- 3) Wild-card file operations are supported (for example,
- DIR *.DAT, DEL *.TSK, SEND *.MAC). Under RSX, Kermit
- uses RMS version 2 to do wild-card operations; this
- is available under IAS V3.2 but not under IAS V3.1.
- Therefore, on IAS V3.1 (the version that the EPA is
- running), there are the following restrictions on file
- operations:
-
- a) Wild-cards must be specified for the entire
- field or not at all. For example, TEST.*
- is OK but TEST*.* is not.
-
- Page 2
-
- b) If a wild-card file operation is executed,
- with either the file-name or the file-type
- specified as a wild-card, the file version
- number is also taken to be a wild-card.
-
- c) Wild-card operations are not allowed on
- directories. Therefore, [*,*]*.DAT is not
- a legal wild-card operation in Kermit-IAS.
- It is legal to use explicit directories, such
- as [200,200]*.DAT.
-
- d) RMS Version 2 supports transparent DECNET
- remote file operations, while RMS Version 1
- does not. Therefore, Kermit-IAS under IAS V3.1
- does not support DECNET file transfers.
-
- e) Renaming files within Kermit is not supported
- under V3.1 of IAS.
-
- 4) Kermit under IAS currently reads packets one character
- at a time, and so can use up a fair amount of the CPU
- if it is receiving files. If it is sending packets
- (sending files or remote command responses), or if it
- is reading commands rather than its file transfer packets,
- it will use long I/O operations and will not put an
- excessive burden on the system.
-
-
- III. Unsupported Features
-
- The only major unsupported features are related to the use of
- RMS Version 1 on IAS V3.1. See the section above on the
- supported RMS features for a discussion of RMS and Kermit.
-
- IV. Installation and Required Files
-
- Kermit is built as a multi-user task, with a task name of
- $$$KER. It can be run as an installed "foreign command"
- task:
-
- PDS> install k11ias
-
- PDS> kermit
- Kermit-11 T2.30
- Kermit-11>...
-
- You can also specify another name for the installed command:
-
- PDS> install/sys:k11 k11ias
-
- PDS> k11
- Kermit-11 T2.30
- Kermit-11>...
-
-
- Page 3
- Or you can just run it as a non-installed task:
-
- PDS> run k11ias
- 16:30:15
- Kermit-11 T2.30
- Kermit-11>...
-
- The following files are supplied for Kermit-IAS to run:
-
- K11IAS.TSK - The Kermit task image
- K11HLP.HLP - The Kermit help file. For this to
- be used by Kermit, it must be in the
- default directory. Note that it is
- not necessary to set the PDS default
- directory since you can also specify
- a default directory within Kermit.
- K11IAS.DOC - This file, describing Kermit on IAS
- K11INS.DOC - Documentation on installation of
- Kermit
-