Networking between host and emulated Alpha

I've followed the instructions in the release notes (for working with a single NIC and with a wireless card) and have got to the stage where both my host laptop and emulated Alpha can ping my router but they cannot ping each other.

They can also both ping another machine on my network (and I can telnet into the Alpha from here).

What have I missed?

Host - HP/Compaq nc8430 (dual core), XP Pro, 3GB. My network is wireless.
Emulated Alpha - VMS v7.3-2 (unpatched), UCX v5.4, DECnet not configured.

Thanks
Martin

Go to the hardware NIC in network properties and uncheck all options under the [b:]General [/b:]tab, [i:]this connection uses the following items[/i:]:. Then be sure the hardware NIC is assigned to FreeAXP in the configuration Wizard and reboot the emulator.

What's probably happening is Windows is still using the hardware NIC as it's primary NIC. Hence your telnet is running on the same NIC as the emulator. Disabling TCP/IP on the hardware NIC will force Windows to use the wireless NIC.

The same problem can occur on a system with dual NICs. Be sure the NIC assigned to FreeAXP has TCP/IP disabled in the NIC properties. Unchecking all options for the FreeAXP NIC guaranties the emulator has exclusive access to the device.

I'll post an update in the Release Notes. This is also covered in section 4.1 in the User Guide.

Bruce,

Thanks for your reply

I tried your suggestion without success - But I did find a solution...

I have configured the network bridge (as recommended in the release notes). Only on the bridged connection do I see the "This connection uses" menu. Unchecking all these meant that my PC could not see the outside world at all.

If I go to the wireless network connection, I don't see the "This connection uses" menu.

I tried unchecking various options and eventually ended up doing a reboot. Still no success.

So I put everything back as it was and found that the emulated system COULD ping the PC. But the PC could only PING the emulated system after the emulated system had PINGed it first.

So I thought the solution should be a very simple one - just add $ TCPIP PING <host system IP address> to SYSTARTUP_VMS.COM after TCPIP has been started.

But it's not quite that easy. That's fine ifsho you connect from the host to the emulated system within a few seconds of the PING but if you wait for a while, the PC seems to loose the route to the emulated system. (This happened in less than 2 but more that 1 minute on my system).

I tried playing with some of the TCP keepalives but without success. So I’ve put a batch job in place to PING the host interface every 60 secs.

I’m sure someone will be able to suggest a better way!

I hope this may help someone else!