[Info-vax] What would you miss if DECnet got the chop?

[John E. Malmberg]

On 9/18/2016 3:35 AM, Dirk Munk wrote:

> First of all, which DECnet do you mean?  DECnet Phase IV should have
> been abandoned years ago, DECnet Phase V has been the successor for
> years now, but many DECnet users are just to plain lazy to learn how it
> works. They took a look at the UI, concluded that is was very different
> from the NCP commands of Phase IV, and just gave up. Or are they too
> stupid to understand it?

The last time this thread came up, I asked for an on-line resource that 
could be used for a hobbyist to get a simple DECNET Phase V network running.

I got no answers at all.  It was like my post went into the bit-bucket.
Or maybe some posts to the news groups are not making into the info-vax 
mailing list.

You can not simply translate NCP commands to NCL.  Too many commonly 
used NCP commands do not translate to NCL.  And many times there is no 
documented way to translate them.

In some cases it involves knowing some Decnet V name for something that 
NCL is not smart enough to default to the only way it is set on the 
system and the NCL help will not provide you with enough prompting to 
find out what it wants to construct the command.  And no way to know 
which Phase V manual might possibly have the answer.

I can get DECNET IV running simply by running a script and passing some 
simple information.  I should be able to do that with the successor.

Now I have spent a bit of time with Phase V, and converted all my 
network object scripts to work with it.  At one time my entire VMS 
network was Phase V.

And I still am having far more trouble with it for a simple setup.  I 
have also worked with other OSI protocols on VMS.  I have seen the fall 
out of many OSI protocol changes as they evolved.

I have had so much trouble with Phase V debugging that I decided it was 
not worth the hassle and have been removing it as I update my home 
systems, since I never see the need to tunnel it over TCP/IP.

And I forget exactly what issue I was trying to do as it was well over 
16 years ago, but one of the things I wanted to script with NCL was only 
documented to be done through a DECWindows Utility.  I could find no 
documentation anywhere on how to use NCL to extract the same 
information.  The same operation was trivial to do with Decnet IV.

As far as a UI or documentation, Phase V was a major jump backwards.

I do not see Phase V replacing TCP/IP for communication with non-VMS 
hosts.  Without that, IMHO, Phase V is pretty much in the same boat as 
Phase IV.  I think I can still get Phase IV clients for non-VMS, or at 
least get the source for them.

Regards,
-John
wb8tyw at qsl_network