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

[Marc Van Dyck]

Paul Sture laid this down on his screen :
> 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

The important is not to hurt applications... Moving to DECnet over IP
is totally harmless to them. So if development resources become scarce,
I'd say keep the top layers only, with IP transport, and ditch the 
rest.
The systems I'm responsible for are still using FAL and task-to-task
thousand times per day, and there are no plans to change that.
Abandoning them is unthinkable in my opinion.

-- 
Marc Van Dyck