OpenVMS 8.3-1H1 on BL860c blade cluster using DECNet Phase V and DECNet-over-IP.
When I enter
$ Phone BAXTERD
I get:-
OpenVMS Phone Facility 12-NOV-2009 % That person's terminal cannot be used as a telephone. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- BUD::SYSDAB
Can you have BAXTERD do sho show term/full and provide the output?
In V7.3-2 if the terminal is set /nobroadcast of has used
$ set broadcast=nophone
Then it will display
That person's phone is unplugged (/NOBROADCAST).
But that's a different message than you are reporting.
I just searched sys$system:phone.exe on a 8.3 alpha, using Hein's STRINGS program, and I don't see any strings that match the string. In fact using search doesn't find the string "telephone".
Are you sure you are using the real phone.exe from VMS?
$ sho sym phone ! make sure it isn't doing something funny $ sho log phone $ ! if you have the verb utility, verify that phone is using image phone
Thanks for your suggestions guys, unfortunately, nothing helped so far.
Some additional information:
1. Have 4 node cluster, 3 blades sharing 8.3-1H1 system disk, and DS10 using its own system disk. Also have 3 external standalone development blade systems (8.3-1H1).
2. The problem only manifests itself when one (or both) of the communicating systems is/are a production cluster blade. The phone utility is working fine between the standalone systems.
As Hoff will probably remember, we had some issues with networking back in Feb, when we first migrated to blades, and as part of the troubleshooting process we trimmed the DECNet Phase V configuration to the absolute minimum, basically reducing all of the references to a single interface. This primarily affected the net$routing_startup.ncl file, and the net$cmsacd_startup.ncl file.
Once the problem was resolved, we were a bit wary about putting the files back, so they have remained as they were.
I suspect that this is a part, if not all of the problem.
Does this make any sense, or explain anything in the context of the "Phone" issue??
When you do a $ SHOW TERM in the target session, what does it indicate?
When you just launch $ PHONE in the target sesssion without a user to phone, what does it report? Does the phone screen appears, or the message I indicated earlier?
In the attachment I have added the information you were asking for.
Basically, between my development machines, Phone is working fine, so I have to assume that the terminal setups on those machines are also fine.
I then matched the production terminal setup to the development machines, (which did require some changes to the DEC_CRT3 and DEC_CRT3 settings), and I get the following results.
When I Phone out from Prod to Dev:
Appears to work OK, i.e. the " is phoning you..." message appears on Dev Session, however when I try to answer I get;
"Attempting to continue after a transmission error..."
When I Phone from Dev to Prod, or from Prod to Prod, I get;
"That person's terminal cannot be used as a telephone."
PHONE is bog-standard DECnet task-to-task communications; there's not all that much that can go wrong.
See if the PHONE servers are enabled and active in the DECnet configurations and if the passwords are correct across the hosts involved.
As for transmission errors...
First, see if PHONE works locally; on the box.
Here's PHONE on a nearby OpenVMS box...
Object = PHONE
Number = 29 File id = SYS$SYSTEM:PHONE.EXE User id = PHONE$SERVER Proxy access = incoming and outgoing Alias outgoing = Disabled Alias incoming = Enabled
To see details in NCL:
NCL>sho sess control application phone all
Node names and back-translations are also something to check; that the hosts all have the same set of node names. If the nodes disagree on DECnet names and addresses, confusion can ensue.
Check accounting or auditing for failures around the time of the transmission errors, too.
Privileges? I'd expect at least NETMBX and possibly or probably TMPMBX.
Configuring Jabber or IRC or other such IM tools on your client boxes would seem to be an alternative, too; PHONE hasn't seen much in the way of changes in eons.
One of the other universal status values, which can easily be reproduced is '9' which maps to 'hn$_unplugged'. Can you try, if this works correctly ? Have a remote user issue a SET TERM/NOBRADCAST=PHONE and dial it using node::user, you should get the 'unplugged' message.
Did you check, whether is makes any difference, if the DECnet goes via native DECnet protocol or via DECnet-over-ip ?
does the following message always show up in NET$SERVER.LOG on the remote node, if you get the phn$_targterm error message ?
%SYSTEM-W-NOSUCHDEV, no such device available That person's terminal cannot be used as a telephone.
Then the next question would be, which operation may fail with NOSUCHDEV and could this failure then be mapped to the 'phn$_targterm' status message.
To find out, whether DECnet-over-IP is being used, do a $ SET HOST node, login and check, whether you see an IP connection to ports 102 or 399 from your source node.
I think you might be getting warm. On Bud, (the production machine)
Bud:BaxterD>> show proc
14-NOV-2009 09:13:20.01 User: BAXTERD Process ID: 203BB516 Node: BUD Process name: "BAXTERD"
Terminal: TNA47274: (Host: 10.20.22.110 Port: 2565) User Identifier: [BAXTERD]
????
Dave Base priority: 4 Default file spec: USERROOT:[BAXTERD] Number of Kthreads: 1
Devices allocated: TNA47274:
whereas on the development machine,
Oesdev:BaxterD>> show proc
14-NOV-2009 09:16:03.98 User: BAXTERD Process ID: 000048F9 Node: OESDEV Process name: "BAXTERD"
Terminal: TNA226: (Host: 10.20.22.110 Port: 2571) User Identifier: [125H,BAXTERD] Base priority: 4 Default file spec: USERROOT:[BAXTERD] Number of Kthreads: 1
I am certain that this is the problem, (and I apologise for keep calling you "Hein")
Old age I'm afraid. I can either concentrate on who I'm talking to, or I can concentrate on the problem, unfortunately not both. (never used to be like that!)
I will need to discuss with my compatriots regarding what they need most, i.e. large numbers of tna/bg devices, or the phone utility. I imagine that the Phone Utility will be the thing to go.
The '7' is supposed to be the output buffer length for the terminal name (TNAxxxx will fit, but TNAxxxxx will NOT !). And the term_number in this routine is only 7 bytes long, so this cannot be easily fixed by PATCH
The OpenVMS V8.3 Release notes describe the the change of the field PCB$T_TERMINAL from 8 to 16 bytes in V8.2. It also suggests to increase the buffer specified for the JPI$_TERMINAL item code to 16 bytes !
So fixing this bug in PHONE would be a nice task for an OpenVMS engineering newhire after his first lesson in BLISS ;-)
At offset 0x0124, you'll find the '7' for the buffer length. The address of the start of the TERM_NUMBER buffer can be found at offset 0x0128. The string buffer itself starts at 0x012C. Due to the OCTAword alignment, the buffer is actually 8 bytes long not 7 bytes ! The next data structure starts at 0x0134. So all that needs to be done is change the '7' to '8', to at least provide a buffer of 8 characters for the TERM_NUMBER, so that TNAxxxxx will fit ! To find the longword '7' at offset 0x0124, you'll have to DUMP PHONE.EXE and look for '00000007' at offset 0x124 inside a block. For me, this is VBN 5. You can easily verify, that you've found the correct block, if there is a '0000000C' at offset 0x010C in the same block.
Feel free to give it a try, you will have to INSTALL REPLACE the patched PHONE.EXE...
There are actually 4 different places in PHONE, where the terminal name is being obtained using $GETJPI and a JPI$_TERMINAL item code:
- BASICCMDS using a buffer length of 7 - LINKSUBS using a buffer length of 7 - MISCCMDS using a buffer length of 9 - TERMINAL using a buffer length of 64 - WOW !
The first 2 occurences could easily be found and patched with PATCH.
I'll report this, when 8.4 fieldtest finally comes around...
