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

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2016-09-19 15:28:27 +0000, Michael Moroney said:

> Of course the VMS builtin where you could access any file on your 
> DECnet with almost any software just by using the file spec 
> node::dev:[dir.sub]file.ext is really great, and is missed on TCP/IP.

There's nothing to preclude RMS from being updated to connect to remote 
RMS FAL servers via TLS, using either certificates or Kerberos for 
authentication.

Or — for a somewhat larger investment — via sftp, rather than requiring 
a FAL server.

It'd be easier to implement if there was a central distributed 
authentication service and password store on OpenVMS, too.   But I 
digress.

On other platforms, this involves a mount and the use of SMB or NFS for 
remote access, or ssh.   Remote FAL file access on OpenVMS hasn't been 
commonly used around any of the local systems I'm aware of or deal 
with, outside of file copies or maybe TYPE commands — and I can 
trivially display file contents or various other operations via ssh, if 
I'm not copying the file.

But then I'd much rather see COPY /SFTP and better IPv6 integration 
than any sort of support for FAL access via TLS or sftp, too.   Once 
the base OS is IP-aware and IP-integrated to at least the level of 
DECnet, then...






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