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

[Dirk Munk]

Michael Moroney wrote:
> Stephen Hoffman <seaohveh at hoffmanlabs.invalid> writes:
>
>> On 2016-10-06 22:04:01 +0000, Dirk Munk said:
>
>>> Stephen Hoffman wrote:
>>>> On 2016-10-06 14:53:14 +0000, Dirk Munk said:
>
>>>>> 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.
>
> Not good enough.  The great thing in the old days was that just about
> any program that used RMS could access remote files via DECnet, without
> any network awareness whatsoever.

Exactly!

>
>>>> SFTP support, a decent client for SMB, and, yes, IP-based FAL-like
>>>> support would be nice.  Particularly with encryption and authentication.
>
> Exactly.  An IP based FAL based on sftp or similar, where network-unaware
> programs can access remote files via RMS just like you could do something
> like $ RUN NODE::DISK:[DIR]PROGRAM.EXE on any VMS system with DECnet. This
> time, securely.

Indeed!

>
>>>> But DECnet is still dead.
>
> IP FAL might be the stake through the heart that's needed.
>

That would be the *only* real replacement for DEcnet.

>>> 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?
>
>> Oddly, the rest of the universe gets by with ssh, netcat, file shares
>> and related.
>
> Yes and the rest of the world gets by without shared-everything clusters
> and M$ PCs filled with bloatware that have to be rebooted every few days.
>

Yes, if you haven't got anything to distinguish yourself from the rest, 
why bother.

>>> 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.
>
> Sure.  Make IP FAL mostly system agnostic.  But able to deal with RMS
> metadata.  VMS's HP TCPIP's FTP has this right.  If talking to another
> VMS system it passes on RMS file attributes.  To any other system it's
> just another FTP.
>
>> I don't want to see time spent on DECnet, more time on EDT nor more
>> time away from the port and the roadmap.
>
> You know what's funny regarding EDT.  Not much time actually went into
> EDT.  Maybe 20 years ago I looked at the sources and was pretty much
> scared off because all the terminal line count stuff was hardcoded
> constants.  Bleah.  But a few months ago there was a thread lamenting the
> 24 line limit and a fellow EDT user talked to me about that thread one
> morning.  I was in a really weird mood, what I call my "mission from God
> mode" but without a mission.  I was curious and decided to look at EDT
> again to see how bad it was.  But then EDT became my "mission" and I
> started changing things. I didn't intend to do it all but I did.  I saved
> the files I changed and ran a build and holy crap, it worked, first time.
> Not checkin ready, in fact that first pass I just replaced the hardcoded
> constants with a "variable" set to a bigger constant, the size of the
> window I was using. But now I knew what needed to be done.  And little
> time was actually "wasted" on EDT.
>
> Since then I've been prodded a few times to look at the 255 character-
> per-line limit... :-) ...much harder.  And there may be more changes
> to EDT, not by me.
>