[Info-vax] Questions and observations about OpenVMS

[Phillip Helbig undress to reply]

In article <s2302h$sbd$1 at dont-email.me>, Simon Clubley
<clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP> writes: 

> > 1) DECnet - It has been said in the past that this is NOT a secure
> > mechanism and in reality its use has been discouraged.  The cases where it
> > is currently used (for my clients anyway) are only where there are networks
> > that are NOT connected to the outside world.  In these cases, security is
> > not as necessary as there is a gap to the outside world.  Here, the
> > connections for applications are through known pathways using the OpenVMS
> > systems as backends.  No direct "user" access other than the
> > administrators.
> 
> That works great until the local network gets compromised.

If the local network gets compromised, you likely have much bigger 
problems than insecure DECnet on that network.

> VMS Mail got altered a decade or two back to stop displaying some escape
> sequences in an email to stop them causing abuse. I don't know the details
> as they were never published in the notice I remember seeing.

Characters with ASCII codes higher than } are displayed as $.