Global Commands

Global commands relate to the entire NetNAT, rather than to a specific interface or facility.

Hostname, setting the NAT's name.
Daemons, starting the special servers.
Watchdog Timer, keeping track of things.
Exit, shutting things down.

Setting the Hostname

The hostname command sets the name of the NAT. The NAT may use its name, in conjunction with the domain name, to determine information about itself, or in disk log messages.

The console prompt on a NAT is its hostname and a greater-than.

Command Syntax

  hostname [hostname]

Where "hostname" is the string to represent this unit.

Controlling our Daemons

There are several daemon processes that we may control from the console or from the startup.htm file. These are the:

Echo server - responds to ping requests
Discard server - throws away anything you send it
WWW server - dispenses knowledge and accepts commands
BSD Authentication server - answer queries from many hosts

The first two are self-explanatory, but the third, the World Wide Web server has an optional parameter. The normal port for a WWW server is 80. The optional parameter on this one is the port to use. If not specified, the default of 80 will be used.

The Auth server listens on port 113 and responds to queries from telnet and other servers, giving them a manufactured User ID in response to their "who is on IP Address/Port nnnn/n?" This service can cut 10 seconds or more from a session startup.

Command Syntax

  start echo                # start the echo server
  start discard             # start the discard server
  start www {port #}        # start the WWW server
  start auth                # start the Authentication server

There will be no response.

The Hardware Watchdog

One of our NATs' unique features is the built-in hardware watchdog timer. This facility monitors the operation of the NATs, and performs a hardware reset in the event of a program crash or hardware hang. The hardware watchdog is an independent device inside the NAT.

The period of the watchdog is controlled by software, although the software merely picks from available values. The parameters to the start watchdog command and the timer values that they represent are:

    Parm     Timeout (sec)
  --------  ---------------
     0       Watchdog OFF
     1           0.5
     3           2.1
     5           8.6
     7          17.2
     9          34.4
    11         137.9
    13         275.8
    15         551.6

We recommend either a value of 7 (the default at 17.2 seconds) or a value of 5 (for 8.6 seconds). Any longer could result in unnecessary delays in restarting the unit.

Command Syntax

  start watchdog            # start the watchdog with default 17.2 sec
  start watchdog {parm}     # start the watchdog with specified parm

There will be no response.

Exit

The exit command causes the NAT to kill all subprocesses, release all conventional and XMS memory and exit to Novell DOS. Before it quits, the watchdog timer is disabled.

This page was last modified on 1 October, 1995.

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