Mailing List Archive

At 12:46 AM 10/12/00 -0700, Guy Harris wrote:
>On Wed, Oct 11, 2000 at 11:49:21PM +0900, Richard Sharpe wrote:
>> I am there fore motivated to start a LAT dissector for Ethereal. Can anyone
>> point me to the protocol specs?
>
>They're probably locked up in some building in Massachusetts or New
>Hampshire in the northeastern US.
>
>I.e., LAT is a DEC-proprietary protocol; DEC have never published a
>spec.

Yes! That and other stupid decisions are part of the reason that DEC is no
longer here (except as a name on some chips in systems that Compaq ships).

>However, at
>
> http://linux-decnet.sourceforge.net/
>
>is the Linux DECNET project page; if you go to
>
> http://sourceforge.net/projects/linux-decnet/
>
>there's a link for latd 1.0, a LAT daemon.

OK. Got it. It is really rather wierd to see my Linux laptop advertising
the service LINUX (and NEMESIS).

>I downloaded an older version of latd and started working on a LAT
>dissector; I've attached what I have so far. It compiles (or it did
>last time I tried it, which wasn't too long ago, I think), and it
>dissects some LAT stuff, but not all of it. It probably should be
>changed to use the new string stuff Gilbert stuck in - as I remember,
>there are some counted strings in the protocol.

OK, Looked at it. It seems that each LAT packet contains an 8-byte header,
but you have not decoded all of the header in most cases ...

>Attachment Converted: "c:\eudora\attach\packet-lat.c"
>

Regards
-------
Richard Sharpe, sharpe@ns.aus.com
Samba (Team member, www.samba.org), Ethereal (Team member, www.zing.org)
Contributing author, SAMS Teach Yourself Samba in 24 Hours
Author, Special Edition, Using Samba

On Wed, Oct 11, 2000 at 11:49:21PM +0900, Richard Sharpe wrote:
> I am there fore motivated to start a LAT dissector for Ethereal. Can anyone
> point me to the protocol specs?

They're probably locked up in some building in Massachusetts or New
Hampshire in the northeastern US.

I.e., LAT is a DEC-proprietary protocol; DEC have never published a
spec.

However, at

http://linux-decnet.sourceforge.net/

is the Linux DECNET project page; if you go to

http://sourceforge.net/projects/linux-decnet/

there's a link for latd 1.0, a LAT daemon.

I downloaded an older version of latd and started working on a LAT
dissector; I've attached what I have so far. It compiles (or it did
last time I tried it, which wasn't too long ago, I think), and it
dissects some LAT stuff, but not all of it. It probably should be
changed to use the new string stuff Gilbert stuck in - as I remember,
there are some counted strings in the protocol.

On Thu, 12 Oct 2000, Guy Harris wrote:

> On Wed, Oct 11, 2000 at 11:49:21PM +0900, Richard Sharpe wrote:
> > I am there fore motivated to start a LAT dissector for Ethereal. Can anyone
> > point me to the protocol specs?
>
> They're probably locked up in some building in Massachusetts or New
> Hampshire in the northeastern US.
>
> I.e., LAT is a DEC-proprietary protocol; DEC have never published a
> spec.

I wonder if you can get the spec on microfiche, like you could with much
of the other DEC documentation.

Searching for "lat protocol" on Compaq's site turns up
http://www.openvms.digital.com/wizard/wiz_1762.html, which says

" The Local Area Terminal (LAT) protocol specifications and internals are
licensed. If you wish to order a LAT license, please contact Compaq
sales directly."


> However, at
>
> http://linux-decnet.sourceforge.net/
>
> is the Linux DECNET project page; if you go to
>
> http://sourceforge.net/projects/linux-decnet/
>
> there's a link for latd 1.0, a LAT daemon.
>
> I downloaded an older version of latd and started working on a LAT
> dissector; I've attached what I have so far. It compiles (or it did
> last time I tried it, which wasn't too long ago, I think), and it
> dissects some LAT stuff, but not all of it. It probably should be
> changed to use the new string stuff Gilbert stuck in - as I remember,
> there are some counted strings in the protocol.
>