 John Martins' |
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TheNet / NetRom Operators Guideby John Martin KF8KK Connecting & Exploring
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| A packet station can
connect to a TheNet node by using either the nodes callsign or
it's alias.
If you connect to the nodes callsign, you will not receive any particular greeting text. Your connection will only be indicated by whatever means your local TNC provides to inform you a connection has been successfully been made. While this seems odd when compared to the nice greetings a standard TNC mailbox would provide to users on connection, for some reason the TheNet gurus decided brevity was close to godliness. If you connect to the nodes ALIAS, you will receive a brief line of text that the system operator provided to describe the node. If the system operator didn't program this text, you will not receive any. TheNet nodes do NOT provide an 'alphabet soup' command line to new connections. Sadly, for the novice user, your first experiences with a TheNet node will be less than overwhelming. You connect and it sits there rather limp. Don't let that fool you!
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| In the image to the right [a
screen shot of a telnet session from a Jnos hamgate used to make the
connection] at the top you can see that a connection
was made to the 'wi0ok-2' TheNet node.
The node didn't send any connection acknowledgement, the only way I knew I was connected was by the connection message provided by my local TNC/Jnos system. (Only when I sent the 'B' command to disconnect did I get a 'TheNet prompt'.) On the bottom of the image is a connection to the Alias 'BEN12' that is used by wi0ok-2. This connection caused me to receive the short connect text, preceded by the TheNet prompt. |
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The word to the wise here is not to expect a TheNet node to say very much to you on connecting. It's not very hard to coax a TheNet node into giving you a command list, all you have to do is send it something that it thinks is a mistaken command and it will respond with a list of commands that are available. |
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| As you can see on the right, I sent the text 'whatthef---' to the node and it responded with the listing of available commands. |  |
| You can just simply send
the node a '?'
and it'll respond with the command list.
If you type 'help' it will respond with a rather brief message affectionately telling you to refer to the published commands for TheNet nodes that are available elsewhere. While this sounds crude, please remember that the entire software that drives this special networking device resides on a small eprom and was written back in the early 1990's to work on equipment built in the late 1980's-- the hardware available was not as feature laden as what we have become accustomed to nowadays. These TheNet nodes do their best at networking, they assume the end user can at least take the time to obtain printed copies of the commands from easily available sources.
What's out there? Where can we go? Who can we connect to? Before we start issuing connections, we want to see what the node hears and can communicate with. Since this is a TheNet node, it can communicate with nodes that it cannot hear directly-- that's all the 'iso level 3' networking part the gurus babble about. |
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On the right, at the top you will see that I entered the 'mh' command for 'me heard'. [TheNet was written by Europeans and they never caught on to the term 'j-heard' as popular here in the USA.] The Mheard list shows the stations and how many packets were heard, what port (0=radio port, 1=wired port) and how long ago they were heard. Near the bottom I sent the 'n' command to get a NODE LIST and there it shows the four nodes that the BEN11 TheNet node can communicate with.
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| Because the nodes shown in the node list are TheNet nodes, we need not concern ourselves with what the routing is to get to them, the software takes care of that automatically. In this particular case, the BEN00 node is accessed via 145.07, the BEN12 and BENQMN nodes are accessed via wires connected to the back of the BEN11 node. KKBBS is accessed via the wires to BEN12 and then via 433.1mhz to the KKBBS station itself. | |
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To connect to either a node or a regular station you just issue the 'C' command followed by the stations callsign or alias. I entered 'c kkbbs' and it connected me through the node system to the KF8KK-3 jnos bbs.
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| Regular stations can be connected to
just the same with the 'C'
connect command.
In the image to the right, n8kmy-1 wasn't reachable, for some unknown reason (he was on the mheard list) but a connection with kg8cu-1 was successful.
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| the 'BBS'
command is another handy command provided by TheNet.
The system operator can program a bbs system that a user is connected to by simply typing 'bbs' as a command. In this case, the bbs programmed into the BEN11 node is KKBBS, and entering 'bbs' makes the connection for me. |
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TheNet Operators GuideIntroduction
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