Setting station number for Acorn Universal Networking
David Lowe (2939) 8 posts |
Hi, I have a Rasperry Pi with RISC OS 5.23 and a RiscPC with RISC OS 3.50, both happily connected to my router by Ethernet and sharing drives with Acorn Access. The RISC PC is also on an Econet connected to my A3000 and Master 128… So, I thought I would try and set up Acorn Universal Networking so my Pi could talk to my Econet, using the RISC PC as a gateway. Ploughing through the AUN Manager’s guide, I find I need to set the station number on my Pi to something appropriate. Going to Configuration > Network Configuration and ticking “Enable AUN Econet”, “This station” is set to 0.0 and greyed out so it can’t be editted. The latest version of the “SetStation” utility (from the Level 4 Fileserver Issue 2 discs) doesn’t work – how do I set station number on a Pi with RISC OS 5? Sorry if I’ve missed something obvious! |
Rick Murray (539) 13401 posts |
You’ll need a 32 bit version of SetStation. Does such a thing exist? The underlying call (https://www.riscosopen.org/wiki/documentation/show/OS_NVMemory%207) implies there is one. Where? And why in 2019 do we have the bizarre notion of such levels of “protection” against changing a station number (note the undocumented pass phrase in the link) when the entire TCP/IP system is open to be fiddled with at will… See also: https://www.riscosopen.org/forum/posts/search?q=SetStation&submit=Go |
Chris Mahoney (1684) 2100 posts |
I don’t think there’s an official 32-bit SetStation, although there’s an unofficial one sitting on my machine if you want it :) |
Rick Murray (539) 13401 posts |
Yes please… |
David Lowe (2939) 8 posts |
Thanks for the advice – and yes please, as well! |
Chris Mahoney (1684) 2100 posts |
The unofficial version is here. There was some concern at the time about having this “too public” (presumably along the same notion as OS_NVMemory 7’s passphrase) but hiding it in a random forum post is probably OK… |
nemo (145) 2437 posts |
Won’t somebody think about the security aspects of my <checks notes> Econet network. I once took over an entire Econet network by peeking the active passwords in the fileserver memory… but that was a Long Time Ago. |
Rick Murray (539) 13401 posts |
Yeah… It’s like we’re bending over backwards to try to provide some false sense of security for a long obsolete network system that was so inherently insecure that it was a piece of cake to extract passwords directly by examining data passing on the wire (or, in your case, yanking it out of the fileserver’s memory). D’you know why we have this ridiculous “oh my God, we can’t allow users to set the number of their station” bollocks? It’s because in the original versions of NETFS, stations 240-254 were “privileged” so that running *PROT would block Notify, Remote, and View except from these privileged stations. 1, SetStation for 26 bit machines, and 6502 machines, is widely available. and: 2, People using Econet these days are likely both user and SYST. I was (until my MDFS melted down), but I kept on using it until around 2008. I don’t deal with ROMs and such these days. It’d be cool to have an Econet interface that plugs into the Pi, but implementing such a thing is likely to be more trouble than it’s worth. |
nemo (145) 2437 posts |
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Rick Murray (539) 13401 posts |
I should add… That nice little password for the NVRam call? Yeah, about that. A while back I wrote a scanner that would search the ROM in-situ for the “signature” of the check (&E220009D, &E2300C23, &13E00000), work out the address, set the ROM to be writeable, then replace those instructions with NOPs. Sometimes it wouldn’t work – I think I’m missing an IMB or cache purge. |