[Info-vax] Rethinking DECNET ?

[Paul Sture]

On 2014-08-30, JF Mezei <jfmezei.spamnot at vaxination.ca> wrote:
> DECNET offers some neat stuff and security.
>
> DECNET 5 was bloated and never popular, but it did get ability to tunnel
> over IP.

The command line interface in Phase V was a large learning curve, unwanted
by many.  The inability to abbreviate commands a la Phase IV (and the rest
of VMS) was particularly frustrating.  In ear^lier versions you couldn't
even shorten SHOW to SHO (and IIRC it never got as short as SH, which didn't
clash with other commands so would have been legitimate).

Phase V was certainly too resource hungry for many VAXes, but I found it
reasonable on the Alphas I used.

One thing that Phase IV could do but Phase V could not was denying access
to other nodes, such as you might want to do to keep development and test
systems away from production environments.

This snippet from a post in 2000 from Larry Kilgallen:

"        If node A has:

                MCR NCP SET NODE B ACCESS NONE

        and node B has:

                MCR NCP SET NODE A ACCESS NONE

the isolation you seek should be provided.

The lack of a Phase V equivalent, seems to be the final matter in
which DECnet-Plus still has not caught up to regular DECnet.  The
US DECUS Security SIG raised this concern to DEC before Phase V
was released."

ref:
http://preview.tinyurl.com/ofnzlw5

full thread:
http://preview.tinyurl.com/k9v2ghb

I remember reading this thread the first time around.  The London Stock
Exchange had had a well publicised hiccup where some test data had
escaped into production, and then this thread popped up :-)

-- 
If your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail
If you own a jackhammer, every problem looks like hours of fun