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

[Scott Dorsey]

Jan-Erik Soderholm  <jan-erik.soderholm at telia.com> wrote:
>Den 2016-09-18 kl. 17:14, skrev Scott Dorsey:
>> Jan-Erik Soderholm  <jan-erik.soderholm at telia.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> I think we have to accept that the rest of the world selected
>>> TCPIP for networking.
>>
>> And, that being the case, we need to have the same features that people
>> have liked with DECNET (such as the remote save sets) available with IP.
>
>Who are "we"? The (remaining) VMS user community? Do we think that we
>can decide what should be used on networks or the internet in general?

The remaining VMS user community.

What is used on the internet in general, we can't control.  But how VMS
supports it is something that maybe we can.

>My guess is that we simply have to learn to live without remote save sets.

Why?  Why can't that be implemented readily over IP?  Either the way Unix
systems do it with a false filesystem that is really a front end to sftp, 
or the way Windows systems do it with a filesystem that is a front end to
smb?

Either one would be fine, it would give us the functionality we want, using
existing network infrastructure.

>The best service we can do for VMS is to "play well" with whatever is
>expected on todays networks. Right, there is DECnet-over-IP, but it
>seems as most user/sites simply decided to use TCPIP tools directly.

I agree thoroughly.  Doing that means integrating IP more tightly into
VMS and removing some legacy DECNET stuff from VMS.

>> In the Unix world, I use the SFTP filesystem for a lot of things that I
>> would have done more easily with DECNET transfers in the VMS world.  In
>> the Windows world they have SMB fileshares integrated in much the way
>> DECNET is integrated into VMS.
>
>I would guess there are a few more Windows nodes out there, then there
>are VMS nodes. I guess volume does have *some* impact here.

Not only that, but both sftp and smb are routable over the public 
internet.  Although if I had to choose a protocol for the job I would
not choose smb.
--scott

-- 
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."