[FADCA] Linux Fpac up and running - sort of..

[John H. Green]

Hi All
    They say the first impression is the lasting one - Well I hope not 
in this case..
Linux Fpac is up and running here, the call is wa4sbd-9/8, 561666. If 
you can reach it try it out. The South Fl. network has this address 
already programmed in, it is my test address. It is a 2 port switch - 
port 0 = lan, port 1 = trunk to WPB.
The lan port is on a low antenna - best to go through wpb to connect.

Some early observations:
- It seems slower than the dos version at times.

- Connecting directly to the switch (L2 connect) is more like netrom 
than fpac, a lot of times you don't get a prompt.

- the heard and info functions are not there, you have to connect to 
node and ask for info or heard list. Actually this is no biggie - at 
least in my mind.

- Node does work, so c node v k4pkt-8,561666 will get you there. c 
wa4sbd-8 v    also works.

- Heard or h will get you the help prompt. You have to use m or m x to 
see the heard list.

- Info, looks like there is only one info file. Lots less info (i0 - i9) 
than what we have now. Hopefully this is solvable by some script writing..

- connecting out on a switch port no longer needs a colon, just c 1 
callsign. This is good..

- I don't see anything to let us see trunk status - like ux in dos fpac.

- when at the site you cannot monitor traffic, at least I have not found 
a way to yet. A lot of the functions we have at the site are missing or 
different.

- Remote sysop has to be a L2 connect, if you come into the switch on a 
L3 connection you will get disconnected after the password routine.

- You have to go through the password routine twice, I don't see where 
the first time does anything different.

- so far when it asks for a password I have to enter the whole password, 
might be a setup problem here..

- When you finally get there and enter help for a list of commands 
available you get a list of 118 commands. Most of which I have no idea 
what they do. I would guess that some are fpac and some are linux 
specific. Some I recognize and see results others just go into never 
land and you have to disconnect to get away from it, you get nothing 
back at all. This will probably be better on the full system install 
instead of the floppy based that is running now.  At least  with the 
full system we will have the manual part of linux, so enter man command 
will give you a lot of info, probably more than we need..

- I don't see any yapp commands, hopefully there is a way to transfer 
files for updating the switch.

- info for setting up the switch is sketchy or strung out in a lot of 
places.

- I'm getting errors on the fpac screen   nrconfig: port nrom0 not 
active   not sure what it means - probably a configuration problem.

- Setting up routing without netmgr is going to be a bear, not sure if 
we want to go back to this confusion. As I mentioned earlier we need a 
routine to parse our cnf file into the conf file...

As Bill would say - enough for now.  I'm sure there will be more.

73  John