Econet LAN party – TNMoC 20th and 21st May 2023

[Ragster]

As an Econet noob, but one with aspirations... I was thinking, following how successful it was setting up a wide area econet over internet connections, would it be feasible to set up a more permanent sort of econet?

Sort of thing where there's a permanently available central connection that any (approved?) econet can connect to, where files can be shared the way they were meant to be.

If feasible, might be best on another thread in a more suitable area... but I thought I'd mention it here since it's what triggered the idea.

[markusher]

I think a few of us have envisioned exactly that. I imagine what Chris has set up has been mainly for dev/test purposes and now we are seeing the evolution of the great work he has done into a more solid use case.

From where we are at the moment, I imagine a more "p2P" type setup, where we can connect our individual networks to a central hub. A web page/python script would show who is currently connected.

This would save the overhead of someone having to centrally manage and admin a central server, although a permanent "reference" server with libraries is not unimaginable.

[BeebMaster]

A long time ago I had the idea of having an MDFS as a sort of central file server accessible over the internet, but none of this had been invented then. Now with the Pi Bridge it would be pretty simple. I think I would like to have a permanently on, or at least regularly on, file server which anybody can use.

I'd also like the file server to be a real Acorn. I'm thinking my A3010 could be used for this purpose.

[BeebMaster]

I've put a couple on FB...

Hurrah - but no good for me, unfortunately. Hoping you (or someone) can post some here.

Nice pics, been itching to see what it all looked like!

They've put you in a hut. 'Course, when I was there last, I was in the Drawing Room in the Mansion.

[markusher]

A long time ago I had the idea of having an MDFS as a sort of central file server accessible over the internet, but none of this had been invented then. Now with the Pi Bridge it would be pretty simple. I think I would like to have a permanently on, or at least regularly on, file server which anybody can use.

I'd also like the file server to be a real Acorn. I'm thinking my A3010 could be used for this purpose.

Absolutely spot on. The idea above would split the ownership/management between the communications layer and the responsibility of having a permanent server. So for example, people could publish their econet to the central "hub" (like we are today). If someone wants to keep that on permanently, and the responsibility of running that is possible. Equally, if someone wants to add a temporary one or more ad-hoc.
The web page simply lists who/which networks are currently on line (and possibly how long it's been online) and a description text field that is taken from the creation of the Trunk.

e.g.
T 1 local IP TO remote IP:PORT D:Mark. logon with BOOT or WELCOME. Hosts various tools and games.

The web page would just show a list of the current active trunks.
77: ONLINE. UP:200 days BeebMaster server with permanent MDFS
78: ONLINE. UP:2 days Mark. logon with BOOT or WELCOME. Hosts various tools and games
79: OFFLINE DOWN:1 day
80...

etc.

[philpem]

If Phil can be added to the central bridge, we can at least have BeebMaster, myself and Phil networked together.
I'm mapped to network 78?

John's already set me up on Tailscale - my bridge calls itself "philpem-pi4-ecobridge" on there. I guess that's what you mean by the central bridge?
I just need to add the relevant configuration lines to /etc/econet-gpio/econet-hpbridge.cfg (I think...). At the moment I've got:

Code: Select all

WIRE NET 1 ON DEVICE /dev/econet-gpio
FILESERVER ON 1.254 PATH /home/pi/econetfs

# Expose only the fileserver on AUN for the LAN
EXPOSE HOST 1.254 ON PORT *:32768

[BeebMaster]

I'm going out shortly (mother's birthday) but the Pi Bridge (77.254) and A3010 (77.31) are on here. A3010 has users Machines, Viewer, Talk, Guest, and Boot with ArthurLib, Library and Library1 available.

[cr12925]

I am planning to provide the facility for trunks over TCP in future, which will make the firewall issues easier. It would then be easy to have such a central hub, providing somebody kept a record of the network numbers that were used either by translation or otherwise.

Edit: It should also support mutual preshared key authentication so that one trunk endpoint (but not both) can have variable IP addresses. The fixed end could be dynamic so long as dynamic dns is used. Also likely that all TCP trunks would connect to the same port number on an individual machine.

C

[markusher]

If Phil can be added to the central bridge, we can at least have BeebMaster, myself and Phil networked together.
I'm mapped to network 78?

John's already set me up on Tailscale - my bridge calls itself "philpem-pi4-ecobridge" on there. I guess that's what you mean by the central bridge?
I just need to add the relevant configuration lines to /etc/econet-gpio/econet-hpbridge.cfg (I think...). At the moment I've got:

Code: Select all

WIRE NET 1 ON DEVICE /dev/econet-gpio
FILESERVER ON 1.254 PATH /home/pi/econetfs

# Expose only the fileserver on AUN for the LAN
EXPOSE HOST 1.254 ON PORT *:32768

you need to add your Trunk line.
TRUNK ON PORT xxx to DOMAIN/IP:PORT
I'm on discord. Might be easier to chat there.

[BigEd]

I've put a couple on FB...

Hoping you (or someone) can post some here.

<photos>

Thanks!

[markusher]

To celebrate the LAN party, I've had the FileStore and Level3 FS source code on an Econet server.

For easier and more general access -
https://github.com/stardot/Acorn-Fileservers

Announcement: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=27015

[rps102]

It was great to be able to attend today and see such a wide variety of models hooked up via Econet.

I had taken along an Acorn bridge in a cheese wedge, believing them to be rare and something folks might like to see, only to find at least half a dozen of them plugged in and bridging away. Gah.

Instead my claim to rarity would be the StrongARM Risc PC with AEH60 running RISC OS 5: a good excuse to check the Econet and NetMonitor modules still working reliably in a 32 bit world. Previously the only testing was on a rather simple 3 machine network at home. This was a 40+ network with network numbers up to 8, all visible and contactable!

Thanks to the organisers and TNMoC for hosting,
Sprow.

[cr12925]

This was a 40+ network with network numbers up to 8, all visible and contactable!

And 77 (@BeebMaster), 78 (Mark U), 111, 114, 116 and 124 (mine at home and at TNMoC)…

On addition to the machines on site there were 8 (including emulators; 4 without) at Mark’s in CH, plus his PiBridge, 3 physical pi bridges of mine plus my M128, and whatever @BeebMaster had up in the zone of the dark mills…

C

[Winston]

Great weekend, excellent way to spend my birthday (which was on Saturday)

I didn't get my MUD to run, but I did get some time to at least reverse engineer some of the more appalling code and figure out how it worked. And get a few routines written as the basis for perhaps doing a bit of a rewrite to how it should have been written in the first place. It was nice to get my BBC Master on the network for the first time, too - and know that its ADF10 is working perfectly

[maniacminer]

We had a good day on Saturday, my A540 and A3000 survived the trip to Bletchley and I got to connect to a whole load of people's kit. A very busy network indeed! A big thanks to Tom Camps (Acorn Curator at TNMoC) for organising the event and a shout out to Jacqui for sorting the pizza and Coke at lunchtime

In September, if there's a serious run at creating the world's largest Econet - maybe we should go for a genuine Guinness World Record? It would be some publicity for the Museum...

[Lum]

It was a great weekend! I'm knackered now, but so many knowledgeable people there and it was really nice to meet you all. Definitely up for September!

[Issue7]

Thanks so much to all who attended. I really enjoyed it, but I'm still tired out by it now! It was great to meet so many people, so the networking was as much conversational as Econet! Really enjoyed learning from you all, and it was good to meet lots of people who used and developed Econet back in the day.

With your help, we also got the rot stopped with batteries removed from some of our stored exhibits. This included the Communicator, which I saw running, but I'm not sure if it went on the network? One of our ABCs had a brief run, but monitor problems meant it was quite short. We'll have a look at that for another go soon. It did reveal it had a customised OS, with the normal Acorn message replaced with someone's name. I am very interested to find out what is on the hard disc, although that wasn't working either.

I'm counting the total as 57 stations plus a remote connection - was this only one at a time? Switzerland is certainly long distance, so that's a record too. That'll give us quite a challenge for next time! On that front, September seems a bit soon for me, as I really need to spent some time giving the collection some quiet TLC first. We've also got a stack of monitors that will need looking at soon, so that is becoming the next priority for us.

So I'm open to suggestions about our next event. Jacqui (the museum director) is very keen for an even bigger do, so I'll have to start looking out some more cables! In the meantime, I think we need more games over Econet. Anyone fancy writing a two-player Tetris?
Tom

[BigEd]

Hi Tom! Great event - will TNMoC be posting a blog post or video or photos at all? Or have I not looked in the right place?

[cr12925]

Hi Tom!

Thanks for a great event

I'm counting the total as 57 stations plus a remote connection - was this only one at a time? Switzerland is certainly long distance, so that's a record too. That'll give us quite a challenge for next time!

There were three remote sets of nets at about 4pm Saturday - mine, @BeebMaster, and Mark’s in Switzerland. I’m pondering a software mod for the bridge which will make it easier to connect remote nets.

Best

C

[markusher]

I'm counting the total as 57 stations plus a remote connection - was this only one at a time? Switzerland is certainly long distance, so that's a record too. That'll give us quite a challenge for next time!

There were three remote sets of nets at about 4pm Saturday - mine, @BeebMaster, and Mark’s in Switzerland. I’m pondering a software mod for the bridge which will make it easier to connect remote nets.

I'm sure I'll be able to add in a few more exotic locations. I did manage to connect dubai to Switzerland and russia to Switzerland although the link was a bit flakey. The problem is more the shortage of Pi4Bs at the moment. I'm sure we'll be able to get Alan Williams in Australia connected up to.

What I will need to do is start rigging up some monitoring and remote on/off switches for individual pieces of equipment like filestores.
I suppose I could rig up the LED status lights to an arduino to check status and an Alexa controlled power socket to reset the equipment / restart hard drives etc.

[KenLowe]

The problem is more the shortage of Pi4Bs at the moment.

Pimoroni has been showing stock in the UK for about a week now:

https://rpilocator.com/?country=UK&instock

[MarkMoxon]

I'm counting the total as 57 stations plus a remote connection - was this only one at a time? Switzerland is certainly long distance, so that's a record too. That'll give us quite a challenge for next time!

I left !Machines running all day on both days, so it tracked all the on-site devices that appeared on the network over the course of both days. If you count the BBC Master that we hooked up to the network right at the end of Saturday, the grand total was 58, with a more modest but still pretty respectable 40 on Sunday. We didn't have all 58 connected and working all at the same time - the network reliability was pretty lively, certainly on network 4 where I was recording this! - but once we got everything working, it was pretty stable.

Note that !Machines was only showing machines within the museum grounds, so the off-site networks aren't included in the following.

First, here are the 58 machines that joined throughout the course of Saturday:

and here's the more detailed view:

And here's Sunday:

with this more detailed view:

The list of file servers wasn't too shabby either:

I recorded this this on machine 130 on network 4, which is probably why the version number for that one is shown as unknown. Risc PCs showed up with empty model names (171 on Satursday and 46 on Sunday were both Risc PCs), and I'm not sure why 8.8 says "no fileserver here".

In terms of machines, the range was brilliant, with the network covering the Atom, Electron, BBC Micro, Master 128, Master Compact, Archimedes, RISC iX and Risc PC, with lots of fileservers and bridges, including Acorn wedges, Acorn Filestores, Level 4 servers, PiEconet bridges, lots of SJ Fileservers, and at least one homebrew self-assembled Filestore.

The weather was very kind, the company was excellent and I, for one, thoroughly enjoyed it. Thanks to everyone who attended, and to Tom and Lee for all the hard work they put in organising, assembling cables, sorting out network connections and doing what TNMOC does best. all round!

Mark

[cr12925]

Though for various reasons your !Machines didn’t see some nets & machines which were actually hooked up (and ciuld log in to 4.254) in the north of England and Switzerland - so the total is more like 70+ for Saturday at least…

C

[arg]

So I'm open to suggestions about our next event. Jacqui (the museum director) is very keen for an even bigger do

I'm not sure what the Museum's objectives are (nor what people were getting up to in the other rooms), but personally it seemed like I was having fun but not actually doing much for the museum - I felt a bit guilty eating TNMOC's pizza, they should have been charging me for being there!

So that leads me to wonder what we can do to be actually useful rather than just randomly hacking on things and then packing it all away: can we work on projects that remain permanently available as part of the exhibit/classroom? Or perhaps it should be a two-part event: meet one weekend for a small group to set things up, then advertise the following weekend for the wider public to come and see what we've done?

Also could maybe have more structure to things - it seemed like most of us brought along more stuff than we could actually do anything useful with in the time and worked more-or-less independently. Maybe we could agree in advance some slightly more constrained goals and people bring stuff/do work focussed on those.

Just my observations - happy to be told that I've got it wrong and everyone else was making huge progress that I didn't notice....

[MarkMoxon]

Though for various reasons your !Machines didn’t see some nets & machines which were actually hooked up (and ciuld log in to 4.254) in the north of England and Switzerland - so the total is more like 70+ for Saturday at least…

Absolutely - I've highlighted the passage where I said that, just so it's clearer.

If we can get accurate numbers for all the other networks, then it would be great to get a definitive figure!

Mark

[rps102]

I recorded this this on machine 130 on network 4, which is probably why the version number for that one is shown as unknown. Risc PCs showed up with empty model names (171 on Satursday and 46 on Sunday were both Risc PCs), and I'm not sure why 8.8 says "no fileserver here".

I noticed that too and had a quick nosey at !Machines' source code. There's a DIM M$(16) for the array of machine types, but only 0-14 are populated. A Risc PC will be machine type 15. Should be an easy fix!
Sprow.

[arg]

If we can get accurate numbers for all the other networks, then it would be great to get a definitive figure!

Some detail on Net 8:

8.235 was actually an FDFS (!Machines draws it with an MDFS icon, but the machine-type is generic for all SJ fileservers so it has no easy means to know)
8.254 genuinely was an MDFS.

8.8 was my PicoEco on a Pi Pico.

I thought JimR's PicoNet was also active on Net 8 at some point on Saturday, but your !Machines doesn't seem to have caught it if so.

There were lots of other machines in proximity to Net 8 but alas they never booted so they don't count: PC Econet card in a 486 PC that resolutely refused to boot either DOS6 or FreeBSD so couldn't enable any drivers (although the card is self-contained and could respond on the network without a driver on the PC side, it doesn't until the driver has told it to start); the Z-server (headless CP/M) seemed to be running but never showed up on the network, and the HDFS spun up its drives and PSU without complaint after years in store, but the CPU didn't run for reasons we didn't have time to investigate.

[Ragster]

I'm not sure what the Museum's objectives are (nor what people were getting up to in the other rooms), but personally it seemed like I was having fun but not actually doing much for the museum - I felt a bit guilty eating TNMOC's pizza, they should have been charging me for being there!

I'm, not sure either - but my perception was that getting econet users together, and having was the main goal. Anything else would be a bonus.

I certainly had fun, and it was very worthwhile from my point of view (although my two poorly beebs remain non-functional, I did get some helpful checks completed and some pointers about what to try next.)

That said, it might be good from TMNOC's perspective - not wanting to put words in their mouths, and with no actual insight - to have some concrete goals to be achieved, that we can, as a group, work towards.
By chance, I spotted the Video Digitiser, sitting in a store room. Having had one in my youth, with some considerable help from @Ukwebb (ROM archive,
ssd imager, eprom programmer), we got it up and running, and there's now a piece of kit that can be used by TMNOC as they will. But that was pure chance.

If there's a list of hardware that needs maintenance/support - e.g. the robot devices that are missing interface boards - then people can look to have the necessary tools/skill/information/parts in advance to address these issues, and we can provide some real value to TMNOC, in return for them giving us a fun place to play.

[sweh]

I'm counting the total as 57 stations plus a remote connection - was this only one at a time? Switzerland is certainly long distance, so that's a record too. That'll give us quite a challenge for next time!

There were three remote sets of nets at about 4pm Saturday - mine, @BeebMaster, and Mark’s in Switzerland. I’m pondering a software mod for the bridge which will make it easier to connect remote nets.

Depending on my availability, I could expose a PiBridge here in New Jersey and connect one of my stations. That'd be about 3500 miles (google says 3452.19 miles as the very tired bird flies).

[MarkMoxon]

I thought JimR's PicoNet was also active on Net 8 at some point on Saturday, but your !Machines doesn't seem to have caught it if so.

True, this was a very unscientific way of counting just some of the machines on the network - I'm sure it missed some machines as the networks were pretty fragile on Saturday morning, and I think I had to restart the application at some point, so it would have forgotten any machines that were only connected before that point. But it's still interesting to see such a varied list of network machines, even if it's missing all the off-site machines, and no doubt quite a few on-site ones too.

If anyone did any more accurate logging of the network activity, we'd love to see it!

Mark