[Info-vax] Rethinking DECNET ?

[Jan-Erik Soderholm]

Dirk Munk wrote 2014-09-02 09:52:
> JF Mezei wrote:
>> On 14-09-01 19:41, Dirk Munk wrote:
>>
>>> decades ago. You can still use Decnet 4 if you like, but JF is now
>>> asking to overhaul Decnet 4 to use it over IP (IPv4 and IPv6?). Decnet 5
>>> can be used over IPv4 and IPv6,
>>
>> I don't care about decnet protocol itself, whether 4 or 5. I care about
>> the integration of decnet within the operating system/file system.
>>
>> aka: everywhere you can have node::  (at DCL, application etc).
>>
>> I mention DECNET 4 because it has NCP which defines network objects,
>> and AUTHORIZE has the proxy database.
>>
>> So if there were a way to port various network objects such as FAL to
>> become native on IP instead of DECNET, it would allow one to continue to
>> support the same functionality provided by the node:: in many places
>> used by the user, without needing an actual DECNET network stack since
>> the objects would be native to IP.
>
> I get your point JF, but what your are describing here is not Decnet over
> IP but adding functionality to the IP stack. FAL functionality would get a
> separate IP port number. But Decnet FAL will also do file conversions if
> necessary. That is because it was designed for operating systems that know
> file types, various types of sequential files, relative files, indexed and
> so on. Unix doesn't have that, a Unix file is just a load of bytes. Unix
> and IP are far more primitive in that respect. FTP for instance will do a
> 'file conversion' with ascii files. If you use ascii FTP to copy a file
> from Windows to Unix, the <cr><lf> end-of-record terminators will be
> replaced by <lf>, but that is about it. You will have to tell FTP that it
> is an ascii file if the file type is unknown (not .txt for instance).
>

But that is a Unix "limitation", not with FTP as such.

At a formar customer, we FTP files to a IBM mainframe (MVS) from
VMS and we specifed all specific storage parameters (LREC, BLOCK
size, whatever their names was) within the FTP session using QUOTE
commands.

Jan-Erik.