[Info-vax] Rethinking DECNET ?

[Dirk Munk]

Jan-Erik Soderholm wrote:
> 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.

And it is also possible to add FDL scripts etc. That's nice, and it is a 
fine workaround, but is it still 'standard' FTP that can be understood 
by any FTP client? I don't think so.