Phone Utility

[The Brit]

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

Any idea of the cause, or resolution for this??

Note: BAXTERD is logged in on the same node.

Dave.

[Jon Pinkley]

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

$ analyze/image/select=(id,build,link) 'f$parse("phone","sys$system:.exe")'

Jon

[Hoff]

Some related reading on getting PHONE to work, and some alternatives that are available:

http://labs.hoffmanlabs.com/node/1091

[Hein van den Heuvel]

You get that message when the terminal is not a CRT.

I just tried with SET TERM/LA36 and got that.

On the terminal itself you get
%PHONE-F-BADTERM, you cannot use this type of terminal as a telephone

For me the fix is: $SET TERM/INQ

Cheers,
Hein.

[Jon Pinkley]

Dave,

Give Hein 10 points.

The reason STRINGS and SEARCH didn't find the text is becaue these messages are in the sys$message:cliutlmsg.exe file.

Jon

[The Brit]

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??

Dave.

[Hein van den Heuvel]

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?

Hein.

[Hoff]

> Does this make any sense, or explain anything in the context of the "Phone" issue??

No, and No. :-)

SHOW TERMINAL on the target session on the target host. Is the target session marked as a DECCRT-class terminal? If not, then PHONE won't work.

[The Brit]

Hein, Hoff,

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."


Dave

[Volker Halle]

Dave,

a quick look in the sources indicates: PHONE is looking for TT$M_SCOPE, if that fails, it will issue the 'targterm' message.

If DECnet links are involved, there is a mapping between various status codes to 'universal' codes, this code is more complicated to look at...

Volker.