Communications Group - Termly Report
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Personnel

W. D. Hay has now left for his year with SDL, S. Currie is committed for
half of his time from 1st October consulting for the Lothian Health Board.
N. Millar is working half time for the Computer Science Dept until the
New Year.

Events of the last term

The UMC-Z80 boards in Node 6 are now working in a satisfactory manner and
Node 6 has almost its full complement of lines. Its reliability has increased
dramatically over the past term. Call logging has been added to both Node 6
and Node 9 to enable traffic rates and patterns to be established.

The software for the DMA interface for the Cambridge Ring has been held
up by significant hardware problems on both the board itself and the 
test equipment.

A JNT PAD has now been delivered and serious testing of it will start
soon, development of the X25 software for the TCPs and FEPs continues.

A Unix host (Electrical Engineering Vax) has been connected interactively
to the network by Jim McKie.

The FTP software is now being used on a regular basis to the DEC10 and
to Kent in particular, but it is being affected by a occasional fault
which causes files to fail and by a longer standing bug in British
Telecom's PSS service.

The software for the JNT 'Black Box' converter is progressing and the first
Intel 88/45 board has been delivered.

The coming term

A second hand PDP 11/60 has been installed and this will be used as a 
gateway between our GEC X25 switch and the Cambridge Ring.  This will
enable a test service to be mounted on the X25 switch.  A couple
of 'real' users will be connected to give us operational experience of
the switch.  It should be possible to allow access to the ERCC VAX from
our TCP's and the PAD as soon as the X25 software is mounted on the VAX.

No further major changes should be necessary in the nodes in the next term,
however some development to support Unix hosts is necessary in the TCPs.
In order to allow mail from external sites in the standard form, it is
going to be necessary to pass extended addressing information over the
NSI/Ring part of the network which will entail fairly major changes in
both the Emas Feps and the PSS Gateway.


                                                      B. Gilmore
                                                      September 1982