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