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

Alex Rubens alexrubensnj at gmail.com
Thu Oct 27 19:54:31 EDT 2016


Decnet over IP on Phase V is brilliant. The simplicity o telling Decnet traffic over designated IP ports allows for the network topology to remain simpler and have a more efficient spanning tree reducing overhead.  Now, if either of the IP stacks supported static IP forwarding, like OpenSSH does, we could implicitly route tunnel the decent traffic over an SSH tunnel assuring the Decnet traffic to be encrypted. Copy/FTP could still be used and be compliant with any security consideration.


On Sunday, September 18, 2016 at 3:25:42 AM UTC-4, Paul Sture wrote:
> On 2016-09-17, David Froble <davef at tsoft-inc.com> wrote:
> > Stephen Hoffman wrote:
> >> 
> >> I'd be seriously tempted to announce the deprecation and eventual 
> >> removal of DECnet, for that matter.
> >
> > Booo!  Hisssss!
> >
> > Ok, we know it's not secure.  Run at your own risk.
> >
> > I'm guessing that DECnet users use it only in house, for FAL and such, so if the 
> > in house environment is secure, then security isn't an issue for DECnet.
> >
> > If it's not going to take up time and effort, then why kill it off?
> >
> > I personally find it can be useful.
> >
> > It sure is handy when you need to shutdown and re-start TCP/IP on a remote (but 
> > in house) system.
> 
> I'd certainly miss one or two things that DECnet does:
> 
> o - the ability to do a SET HOST 0 /LOG= to get a log / audit trail of software
>     installations and configuration sessions.   Yes, many terminal emulators can
>     do logging, but those logs aren't on the target system.
> 
> o - using DECnet as a means of placing BACKUP savesets on another node, and
>     restoring them from other nodes (where 'other' can be either local or
>     remote).
>     
> o - DECnet tasks.  Useful but I haven't seen many customers use these.
> 
> o - FAL
> 
> -- 
> It was untidy, so got unplugged.
> It was unplugged, so got thrown away.



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