[Info-vax] Reinventing VMS logical names (Fuchsia & Win NT)

[Robert A. Brooks]

On 11/9/2023 8:47 AM, Dan Cross wrote:
> Jake Hamby (Solid State Jake) <jake.hamby at gmail.com> wrote:
  
> 
>> If I were hired to work on the future of OpenVMS, the one
>> non-obvious direction I'd explore (anticipating what customers
>> aren't yet asking for) would be to extend logical name tables
>> and VMS's existing concept of multiple object classes with
>> common security attributes to provide a secure way for
>> processes to grant capabilities to each other via special
>> mailbox messages or special LNM entries in a shared table.
> 
> That actually sounds kind of interesting.

If you look at the original plans for DECnet/OSI in the late 80's/early 90's,
the expectation was that the distributed naming service would be used for much more than
node name lookup.

I was a customer at the time, so at that point, I was hearing rumours, but a big concern was
how many naming servers would one need for clusters of varying sizes.

VSI has all the old internal DEC Notes conferences; reading some of the internal
communication around that time, it's apparent that concern was HUGE deal with the sales force,
as that was a constant question coming from customers.

As we all know, the project became quite delayed, and among the aspects of the project that got
tossed was the DNS as a broker of all objects.

Yeah, that would not have addressed the security aspects noted by Jake, but it would have been
an interesting start.

-- 
		-- Rob