[Info-vax] DECnet use in today's world, was: Re: Tangent about DECnet versions.

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2018-05-19, Grant Taylor <gtaylor at tnetconsulting.net> wrote:
> 
> I'm curious, does anybody have any idea how prevalent any of the 
> following DECnet phases are these days?

There is ample evidence of production use of DECnet Phase IV+ and Phase 
V around.

Phase IV and earlier are point-to-point or multipoint and predate 
Ethernet support, so those do tend to be somewhat more rare.  Though 
undoubtedly a few installations do still exist.

As for how many folks are presently using DECnet?  No one knows.

Or from a slightly different perspective, there are too many folks that 
are running twenty-year-old and older apps and app designs and that 
haven't been moving those apps and those designs that data forward, and 
no one knows how many apps or what for or what particular DECnet usage. 
 That due to the lack of connection security and the lack of 
distributed authentication within DECnet, and due to the lack of 
telemetry.

Welcome to the very rich past of OpenVMS, and to how folks running "the 
most secure operating system on the planet" can quite often have 
woefully insecure networks.  DECnet, telnet, FTP and ilk are still 
commonly used at many sites.







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