[Info-vax] DECnet Phase IV broken after VSI update

[Craig A. Berry]

On 10/31/21 4:27 PM, Lawrence D’Oliveiro wrote:
> On Monday, November 1, 2021 at 1:59:27 AM UTC+13, Craig A. Berry wrote:
>> On 10/30/21 9:26 PM, Lawrence D’Oliveiro wrote:
>>> On Sunday, October 31, 2021 at 12:00:05 PM UTC+13, Craig A. Berry wrote:
>>>> In my case Kermit from a Linux system tunneled over SSH stopped working.
>>>
>>> What sort of errors was it reporting?
>>>
>> None. It just hung. My best guess is the host was waiting for a reply
>> to the inquiry that it never got.

> There are ways to debug that

Yeah but, no one making decisions wanted it debugged, I don't have 
access to the sending system, and it's all slated for replacement very 
soon.  Three of four interfaces that use this mechanism have recently 
been retired.

, but ... come to think of it, why are
> you bothering with Kermit when you have SSH? Because SSH includes
> secure file transfer capabilities via SCP and SFTP, so why not use
> those?

Numerous reasons.  Kermit has a very nice scripting capability and the
scripts that had been working for a decade or three with serial ports
and/or terminal servers worked with few if any changes after swapping
out the underlying connection to use  ssh.

Also, scp to VMS systems from non-VMS systems mostly doesn't work --
they use different and incompatible versions of the protocol.  The only
real workaround I've found for that is to build PuTTY on the Unix/Linux
system and use its pscp rather than scp.  This problem is going away in
TCP/IP Services 6.x and the separate OpenSSH package that gets installed
alongside it, but that's not generally available quite yet, and
certainly wasn't available when we retired the last terminal server
about twelve years ago.