TSX-Plus Password Hacking & Other PDP-11 Issues

In response to problems that I'd mention regarding getting the RL11 controller to happily co-exist with the RX11 Ethan Dicks said: cards were either BR4 or > BR5. Remember that an interrupting device breaks the grant chain for all peripherals to the at the same BR level as the front, then test. No > reason to leave it there permenently - it should be a robust enough device to go anywhere in the an RQDX1 is involved, but So, I followed this advice, and greatly so, everything worked fine. However, I later found that the position wasn't really the issue. The problem was that the BR selection header on the RX211 controller really squeezez the tolerance in terms of inter-board spacing. What was happening is that with the RX211 behind the RL11 controller, the BR selection header on the RX211 was apparently shorting some connections on the back of the RL11 controller. So, *that's* what that fully looking piece of semi-transparent orangish-material that I found in the base of the cabinet when cleaning things up...apparently it was some kind of insulator placed on top of the header to prevent just such shorts. Fortunately, the shorts didn't cause any damage. When I swapped the boards' positions, the interference didn't exist anymore, and everything works like a champ. The RL01 drive works flawlessly, and both the RX02 drives also work great. Here's another question for you DEC folks: The system has the main backplane (closest to the front panel), then there's the RK11 backplane, which is connected to the main bus by a bus jumper, and from the last slot (A&B) of the RK11 backplane, is another jumper which conncts to a 9-slot expansion backplane. Question is: Is this correct? Should the RK11 backplane (4 slots in which the RK11 4-board RK11 controller plugs into) be situated BETWEEN the main bus and the expansion bus, or should it be located at the end? Next question, back on the TSX-Plus password hacking part of the thread; On one of the floppies I was given, I found a program called TSAUTH.SAV. This program runs from RT-11, and appears to be a tool to manage the ACCESS.TSX and CREDIT.TSX files. The CREDIT file appears to be a structured text file, which contains PPN's, "user names", and privilege information for each account. The ACCESS file appears to be where the passwords are strored in some encrypted form. The TSAUTH program has just gives the normal "*" prompt when run. I tried all kinds of combinations of characters for commands, and found that it responds to "A", "L", "P", "E", and "K". E exits the program. The other commands result in a "PPN:" prompt. By looking through the CREDIT.TSX file, I could find out PPN's, so I tried entering one of the PPN's listed in the CREDIT file after typing the "K" command (which I assumed means "KILL"), figuring that would wipe out the user's entry. It didn't. Using BINCOM, I backup copies of the CREDIT and ACCESS files with the actual files, and there was no change. If I moved the ACCESS.TSX and CHARGE.TSX files to different names and ran the TSAUTH program, it complained that it couldn't find the ACCESS file, so I know the program is somehow supposed to manipulate this stuff. DUMPing the TSAUTH.SAV file results in some text clues that make it clear that the program is an administrative tool. Messages such as one asking the user if they wish to make a new authorization file, and how many entries to reserve for users should be created. I tinkered with the program for quite a while, and couldn't get it to emit those messages no matter what I did. The "E" command is used to exit the program -- the only command that I could really tell that did anything. Does anyone have any TSX-Plus Version 5 manuals that they could look up this command and let me know how it works? Many thanks to all, Rick