Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!CITHEX.CALTECH.EDU!carl
From: carl@CITHEX.CALTECH.EDU (Carl J Lydick)
Newsgroups: comp.os.vms
Subject: Re: Disallowing logins on Terminal ports
Message-ID: <880604084018.160@CitHex.Caltech.Edu>
Date: 4 Jun 88 15:47:02 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 26


 > We have a problem concerning terminal ports and the NIU's used to
 > connect to the campus network. Whenever the NIU times out and goes to
 > the idle state the Vax interprets the response from the NIU as a login
 > attempt and prompts for a password. The NIU screams back "Invalid Response"
 > or something like that. The Vax of course kicks back "User Authorization
 > Failure" to which the NIU responds again with another error message. And
 > off it goes .... with the Vax and the NIU ping-ponging error messages
 > messages back and forth and the console spitting out all kinds of access
 > violation messages.
 > 
 > Is there a way to disable logins on a specific port while still
 > allowing a user to connect to the port via kermit to go through the
 > NIU and onto the network? We have tried all sorts of things with the
 > NIU and it seems doing something from the Vax end is more feasable.

You can set the port /NOTYPEAHEAD/PERMANENT.  Then the user can allocate
the port, set it /TYPEAHEAD, and use kermit to connect to the port, etc.

Alternatively, you can set the Initiation Character for the NIU (I assume
you're talking about Ungermann-Bass NIU's) to something non-null (we typically
use control-V here).  Then the user can connect to the port with kermit,
send the initiation character, and then proceed normally.  Doing it this
way, when the NIU goes idle, the VAX will still interpret it as a login
attempt, but since it doesn't send the initiation character as part of the
login prompt, the NIU will ignore it, the login attempt will eventually
time out, and things will remain stable thereafter.