[COFF] Re: Archived A Couple 5ESS Training Programs

[Brad Spencer <brad@anduin.eldar.org>]

Andrew Warkentin <andreww591@gmail.com> writes:

> On 2/20/24, segaloco via COFF <coff@tuhs.org> wrote:
>>
>> In any case, the simulator interests me greatly.  I intend
>> to do a little digging around in it as time goes on to see
>> if there may be traces of 3B20 emulation or DMERT in the
>> guts.  I'm not holding my breath, but who knows.  Either way,
>> it'll be interesting to play with.  Thus far I've only
>> verified the simulator launches, but have done nothing
>> with it yet.
>
> I've installed the simulator and it doesn't appear to be based on any
> kind of 3B20 emulation (unlike the emulator used on the VCDX's
> administrative module). It's mostly a collection of DLLs and what
> appear to be some kind of table files.  I guess it could be a port of
> the actual 5ESS UI code to Windows, but I'm not quite sure of that.


I am not familiar with this particular simulator, but it could simply be
a program or program set that was made to look like the 5E without
anything from the actual 5E being involved.  I was involved a bit with
simulating switch responses for the OSS system I worked on at
AT&T/Lucent and that was done mostly with either stand alone programs
which simply responded minimally like the caller expected or later with
a simulation engine that a coworker wrote that could be programmed to
respond in a more complete and configurable manor than the stand lones
could do.  We never used any of the actual switch code to do any of
this, just used what the documentation said would be the call and then
generated a response.  As far as I know these simulators never left our
group.  I also wrote for, my own purposes, a simulator that simulated
the backend of the OSS system I worked on so that I could point an
instance of the web / HTML based UI I was writing for said system
without having to actually have a backend system present and do
development.  In fact, much of my own development on the Web UI for that
OSS system was done in the simulated environment first.  I would not be
suprised that the training group came up with a way to simulate the 5E
UI based just on the inputs and outputs.







-- 
Brad Spencer - brad@anduin.eldar.org