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Table of Contents
NetRomX - Extended NetRom
NetRomX is an XRouter extension to the NetRom protocol, providing up to 65536 different “services” on a single SSID (Secndary Station IDentifier).
Paula G8PZT published the idea in July 2001, in a Packet White Paper entitled “NET/ROM DATA MULTIPLEXING” PWP109, and it was incorporated into XRouter.
So far, only XRouter supports NetRomX.
NetRomX is simply standard NetRom, with a different type of connect request, given the mnemonic CREQX (Connect REQuest eXtended).
This type of request includes a 16-bit “service number”, and can therefore request connection to any of 65536 separate types of process on the target system.
This is a major improvement over “standard” NetRom, which only allowed a node to host a maximum of 16 L4 services, one per SSID. This was not just a barrier to the development of novel services… In order to be connectable via L4, every such SSID had to be in everyone's nodes tables. And there was no agreement on which SSID should represent which service.
With NetRomX there is no need to clutter the nodes tables with SSID's, because every service has a STANDARD number, as shown in the table below.
If you know that the target system is XRouter (usually they have “XR” in the alias), you can be sure that if their PMS is enabled, it will be on service 2.
Standard services facilitate simple commands such as “TIME <nodecall>”, to discover the local time, time zone and daylight saving status at a distant node. Or “PMS <nodecall>” to connect directly to someone's PMS.
It is envisaged that some of the services may be used by network crawlers (human and machine) to harvest data without needing to know the exact format of the commands on all the different types of software.
Standard Services
These are the service numbers that have been allocated so far. Services NOT marked “(reserved)” are already implemented in XRouter and must not be used for any other service type:
No. Service Description
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0 CMD Normal connection to Node's command line
1 INFO Standard Information server
2 PMS Personal Message System
3 BBS (reserved for Bulletin Board System)
4 DX (reserved for DX cluster/dx-spot feed)
5 TPP (reserved for "Tampa Ping-Pong" chat)
7 ECHO Echoes data back to sender
8 CHAT XRChat server
9 DISCARD Data sink
10 RMS (reserved for winlink RMS}
11 BPQCHAT (reserved for BPQ chat server)
13 DAYTIME Local date/time (similar to RFC867)
14 APRS APRS Server
15 APRSH APRS Server (Human Readable)
16 WX Local weather information
17 TELEM (reserved for Telemetry server)
18 SMS Short Message System server
19 CHARGEN Generates a test pattern
20 NDATA (reserved for NFTP extension)
21 NFTP Netrom File Transfer Protocol
22 NSSH (reserved for secure login - if legal?)
23 TELNET Normal L4 login (same as 0)
25 SMTP SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) Server
26 MHEARD MHEARD server (shows MH lists)
27 DXLIST DX List server (shows DX lists)
28 WALL Message Wall (like Facebook of old) / guestbook
29 BLOG Sysop's Blog
79 FINGER Finger server
80 HTTP NetromWeb (HTTP over Netrom) server
87 NTTY Netrom TTY - Keyboard to keyboard chat
110 POP3 POP3 (Post Office Protocol 3) Server
125 MTP2 Message Transfer Protocol (version 2) server
1883 MQTT MQTT Broker
“XRouter - Making Packet Great Again!”