[Info-vax] VMS - Virtual Terminals - A security risk way back yonder OR was that an Old Wives Tale ?

[Hein RMS van den Heuvel]

On Thursday, February 11, 2016 at 11:12:57 AM UTC-5, Michael Moroney wrote:
> IanD <iloveopenvms at gmail.com> writes:
> 
> >Anyhow, I got to thinking about how in one place I worked, we had VMS 
> >virtual terminals but that after a few months, they were taken away and 
> >when-ever anyone enquired about there reinstatement, the security trump 
> >card was pulled out and the system manager 'dealer' always won that 
> >conversation / deal
: 
> Virtual terminals are still around.  They were great with flaky dialup 
> lines,  However, virtual terminals don't work with SSH, DECnet (SET HOST),
> DECterms and maybe not telnet (unsure).  So they see little use now.


Hoff address the security issue. You still have to login, to connect so that's as secure or insecure as you believe OpenVMS login to be. The same signatures on the wire.

The resource concern is and was total bollocks. Taking down a process and recreating a process over and over re-running syslogin and login and so on is infinitely more expensive than just keeping a process around, assuming there has to be room for the user at any time. With a pool of 5000 students on a system configured for 500 processes this obviously does not hold.

The practicality is and was tremendous and totally under appreciated back than as it is now. 
It goes well beyond 'flaky modem lines'. 
It is just SOOO nice to be able to come back to where you left off. 
To up-arrow and find your last command, NOT to have to 'set default' and the likes to switch to a particular context, NOT to re-select a particular RDB or Attunity Navigator context.

It's just so sad not all terminal driver kept up with this wonderful feature. Fortunately Telnet works. Physical terminals / Lat connections don't really exist anymore do they? 

I have some sessions in the office, switch my laptop to standby, go home, resume and presto... still in TPU with at the most a ^W to put me right back. Same thing overnight. In the morning I am still in the debugger and a STEP moves me forward just so.  How can anyone live without?
As a workaround, when VTA's are not available, I just an MSTSC (RDP) session to a stable server in the office and hop in and out from there, leaving my ssh and other sessions open. 

It's a darn shame I'm force to go that low and use Windows to solve an OpenVMS deficiency. The other thing Windows is also infinitely better than OpenVMS is for command line recall and editing. As much as I love OpenVMS and DCL, the command line editing is a lame joke in DCL. 
Shameful, hurtful, NIH syndrome. "we know what's good for you".. no you don't.

Cheers,
Hein

Hein