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

[Dirk Munk]

Stephen Hoffman wrote:
> On 2016-10-06 14:53:14 +0000, Dirk Munk said:
>
>> Stephen Hoffman wrote:
>>> On 2016-10-06 07:25:24 +0000, Dirk Munk said:
>>>
>>>> Well then, let me give you a very good reason to scrap....
>>>
>>> Get off of DECnet.
>>
>> The nice thing about DECnet Phase V over IP is that you can use IP DNS
>> names and thus IP addresses.
>>
>> So dir vsi.com::dka0: works in DECnet Phase V.
>>
>> Build a replacement in pure IP, and tell us when it's ready.
>
> DIRECTORY /FTP works fine without DECnet, and supports domain names.
> Available since V6.2.
>
> SFTP support, a decent client for SMB, and, yes, IP-based FAL-like
> support would be nice.  Particularly with encryption and authentication.
>
> But DECnet is still dead.

So the bottom line is that DECnet is dead, but 40 year old DECnet has 
functionality that today's IP can not offer to VMS. Or am I wrong?

And that is the problem. To those who claim that we should forget about 
DECnet, I can only say give use an equivalent IP product with the same 
functionality as FAL, the same ease of use, even from within 
commandfiles or applications. As long as you can't offer that, stop 
telling us to forget about DECnet.

That other protocol can be just as VMS specific as Multinet's DECnet 
over IP lines, I don't care. Design it, put it in VMS and perhaps then 
we can talk about forgetting DECnet.

Oh yeah, and I don't think is has to be encrypted. Like I wrote before, 
a VMS system should be communicating with other VMS systems using IPsec. 
It will secure *all* IP communication between these systems, no need to 
do encryption in applications.