[Info-vax] Use of logical names other than I/O redirection

[David Jones]

On Saturday, September 10, 2022 at 7:35:08 PM UTC-4, alanfe... at gmail.com wrote:
> Greetings. 
> 
> I recall Hoff once lamenting about logical names. He said they are mostly good for I/O redirection. And, IIRC, not liking using them to store application data. 
> 
> I was wondering how people here (esp. Hoff!) feel about their use in batch queues and mail. 

I use VMS mail very little these days. Submitting to a queue by its logical name seems 
sensible me. Programs by default submit to SYS$BATCH/SYS$PRINT, so a mechanism
to redirect those is handy.

IIRC, the original incarnation of logical names gave each a single value and you only had
process, group, and system tables. The latter 2 required privilege to (GRPNAM, SYSNAM)
to add names, since they were shared resources ($CREMBX added to the group table for
temporary mailboxes and system table for permanent, gated by different privilege bits).
The features that came with the big overhaul in OpenVMS 4 made abuse much more
tempting. My SSH server, for example, posted information about active connections to a
logical special logical name table so the system manager could easily see where the
connections were coming from (and match up the TCP port number with the connection
so she could kill it).