After three years of frustration trying to remember what I'd done to
get this to work once, I finally managed to get puTTY and SIMH to work
together. The entire problem was that NOWHERE did anybody say YOU
******* NEED TO ******* TURN THE ******* FIREWALL OFF! It's no good
saying "do A,B,C, that works for me" without also saying "oh by the
way, you also need to do F,G,H,I,J,K,L,M to get it to work, you have
to GUESS that bit".

The error 'Network error: connection refused" does not mean "you
haven't configured things properly", it means AN EXTERNAL PROGRAM IS
ACTIVELY BLOCKING THE CONNECTION. KILL THAT EXTERNAL PROGRAM!

Anyway, so that other people don't spend three years tearing their
hair out, I'm posting here what I did to get things to work.

Run puTTY.
In the configuration, set the Terminal and Window settings to taste
In Session, set:
Host name: localhost
Port: 8023
Connection: telnet
Saved sessions: simh
Save
Then select Open and allow the connection to fail, then quit puTTY.

I start SIMH with a batch file that references an INI file:
unix7.bat:
cd /d %0\..
start pdp11 unix7.ini

unix7.ini:
set console telnet=localhost:8023
set console pchar=37777777777
set cpu 11/45
set rl0 rl02
attach rl0 unix_v7_rl.dsk
!start C:\Apps\Internet\puTTY\putty.exe -load simh
boot rl0

Now TURN OFF YOUR FIREWALL!!!!!!!

Running unix7.bat should start SIMH, start puTTY, and connect the two.
This also works for my unix6, unixbsd and rt11 launchers, mounting the
relevant images and booting the relevant disks. The important bit is
to run puTTY from the INI file. If you run it from the batch file
it times out before SIMH has managed to get started, and running it
manually you never managed to click in all the right places in time.

I also never managed to get the -telnet command line option to work,
so created a session and used that. The additional advantage to using
a session is that I can set all my terminal and keyboard preferences
for that particular session.

There should be a way to configure your firewall to create an exception
for puTTY and SIMH, but at the moment I haven't managed to find the
way to do that here with Avast. So, at the moment, I turn Avast off, launch
SIMH/puTTY, then turn it back on again. It only needs to be off for the
initial connection.

Jonathan Harston <jgh@mdfs.net> writes:

> After three years of frustration trying to remember what I'd done to
> get this to work once, I finally managed to get puTTY and SIMH to work
> together. The entire problem was that NOWHERE did anybody say YOU
> ******* NEED TO ******* TURN THE ******* FIREWALL OFF! It's no good
> saying "do A,B,C, that works for me" without also saying "oh by the
> way, you also need to do F,G,H,I,J,K,L,M to get it to work, you have
> to GUESS that bit".
>
> The error 'Network error: connection refused" does not mean "you
> haven't configured things properly", it means AN EXTERNAL PROGRAM IS
> ACTIVELY BLOCKING THE CONNECTION. KILL THAT EXTERNAL PROGRAM!
>
> Anyway, so that other people don't spend three years tearing their
> hair out, I'm posting here what I did to get things to work.
>

I think once you get to the point of "my firewall was disallowing
connections to localhost and I didn't think to google what 'connection
refused' means for 3 years" you're starting to get beyond the list of
things that might reasonably be covered in SIMH documentation. Besides
that, "turn the firewall off" isn't the correct response, "fix your
crappy firewall" is.

Maybe this is a sore point for me because in my day job customers
constantly say "Your product is broken" when what's *actually* broken is
their network, or their firewall, or their storage array, or a million
other things which aren't our responsibility but *become* our
responsibility because people are intellectually lazy. You're right,
we're *not* indexing the logs from your webserver any more, because your
webserver has been down for 3 days and you didn't notice!

>
> There should be a way to configure your firewall to create an exception
> for puTTY and SIMH, but at the moment I haven't managed to find the
> way to do that here with Avast. So, at the moment, I turn Avast off, launch
> SIMH/puTTY, then turn it back on again. It only needs to be off for the
> initial connection.

Hasn't Windows shipped a passable firewall built-in since XP SP2?

john