Welcome (and Forum history)
Posted: Thu Jul 23, 2026 4:53 am
Hi,
Since I retired from DEC, with more than 40 years of IT experience behind me, I had plenty of time to write some tools needed to help me in 2026 as a Volunteer in a French non-profit organization. I joined the organization three months ago as the IT Man and found A LOT of problems, all of them dealing with local network issues (unreachable shares, invisible remote printers, fluctuant remote desktop access, you name it). It took me one full month to do an inventory of the IT infrastructure and equipments: routers, smart switches, network racks (2), patch panels (2), UPS and Internet gateways (2). This work lead to a 130 pages document.
After that, I was able to do some diagnostics but my knowledge of the Windows Internals and Data Structures (Hello Larry & Ruth!) was not inuf to fix all problems I found, so I decided to "Go ChatGPT". The smart cat (I obviously named it Gipiti) suggested me to write a Q&D python utility, NetDTL, to help. I told my cat: "I do not know Python, I know Basic+2, Fortran IV, Macro-11 and OpenVMS DCL". It said back: "Don't panic, I'll write it for you".
This was the beginning of the NetDTL Suite.
Questions on these tools? Feel free to post them in here.
Bye for know.
Didier aka PRSTSC::DTL
#154 775
Since I retired from DEC, with more than 40 years of IT experience behind me, I had plenty of time to write some tools needed to help me in 2026 as a Volunteer in a French non-profit organization. I joined the organization three months ago as the IT Man and found A LOT of problems, all of them dealing with local network issues (unreachable shares, invisible remote printers, fluctuant remote desktop access, you name it). It took me one full month to do an inventory of the IT infrastructure and equipments: routers, smart switches, network racks (2), patch panels (2), UPS and Internet gateways (2). This work lead to a 130 pages document.
After that, I was able to do some diagnostics but my knowledge of the Windows Internals and Data Structures (Hello Larry & Ruth!) was not inuf to fix all problems I found, so I decided to "Go ChatGPT". The smart cat (I obviously named it Gipiti) suggested me to write a Q&D python utility, NetDTL, to help. I told my cat: "I do not know Python, I know Basic+2, Fortran IV, Macro-11 and OpenVMS DCL". It said back: "Don't panic, I'll write it for you".
This was the beginning of the NetDTL Suite.
Questions on these tools? Feel free to post them in here.
Bye for know.
Didier aka PRSTSC::DTL
#154 775