[Info-vax] What would you miss if DECnet got the chop? Was: "bad select 38" (OpenSSL on VMS)

[Dirk Munk]

ergamenes at gmail.com wrote:
> On Thursday, 6 October 2016 08:25:26 UTC+1, Dirk Munk  wrote:
>
>> Well then, let me give you a very good reason to scrap Phase IV. These
>> days it is normal to use many Ethernet interfaces on a system, hook up a
>> system with 4 Ethernet interfaces to one switch and 4 Ethernet
>> interfaces to another switch (redundancy) for instance. Every interface
>> can be used for a specific purpose. Datacenters are designed around such
>> infrastructure principles.
>>
>> What happens when you do that with Phase IV, or Phase V in Phase IV
>> compatibility mode?
>
> It works just fine, unless you have really ancient switches that don't have per-VLAN MAC tables. The only slight downside is that using failover pairs with the LLA interface only gives you active-passive failover, whereas on other platforms you would active-active trunk with LACP. That's a virtual Ethernet driver issue though, and I think VSI are working on it.
>

Now why should they do that? Phase IV is ancient. No work on it's far 
more modern replacement as is suggested here, but new work to get round 
the problems caused by the antique Phase IV?

Apart from that, DECnet Phase IV routers are almost impossible to get, 
unless I'm mistaken. Cisco had announced end-of-life for DECnet Phase IV 
routing.

The performance of Phase IV is far less (I did performance tests), it's 
based on ideas from 40 years back.