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DECnet Isn't Dead
Ronald Dumsfeld writes "The odds of folks under the age of 25 on Slashdot having heard of DECnet are pretty slim. This article over at Datamation gives some insight into people who've not given up on it. Poke around and find the documentation for the OSI-compliant version, or download the Linux version of the older DECnet IV and bask in the Security Through Obscurity."
Haven't you been contacted by Nigeria-Soft yet? They kindly sent me an e-mail informing me that I was using TCP/IP unlawfully! I was shocked! Thankfully I was checking my spam folder because this was one message that I definitely didn't to miss because Yahoo was stupid and flagged it as spam. I'm sure you want to avoid using their protocol illegally just as much as I do. You can send your liscencing fee of $1000 to them at 84 Goat Herd Rd, Ngeria. Sure it's a little expensive, but you don't want to be stealing their protocol from them, do you?
The laws of probability forbid it!
Once I flipped my sniffer to look at more than just TCP/IP I found both IPX and DECnet running hard, doing full file system backups, copying gig's of old logs, etc. Their network "admins" valuable input was limited to: "sniffers can do that?"
Anyway, not completely dead...
Why, I use DECnet all the time. I am a purist, and refuse to work with upstart protocols like TCP/IP. I believe the height of technology in its purist form came in 1985. So why upgrade?
Why, my gopher web server works just fine, and I run it from a floppy disk on my 8088 XT. In fact, I do everything on my 8088 XT. It can even play Midi files in mono! Sure, it's not as pretty as some of the fancy shmacy new wave "windows" systems, but show me something you can't do from the command line in DOS, and I'll show you something I refuse to learn how to do.
Why, when I was your age, we had to walk ten miles to school, program in BASIC, and the games we played were based on revolutionary 8 bit technology! We didn't have an "internet." Internet schminternet, give me a text based BBS for my Hayes 3 Baud modem, and I can download over pixilated porn till the cows come home. And we liked it!
This signature has Super Cow Powers
Alpha is dead, but DECnet lives on.
*sigh*
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
Yup. Being a Christian means saving yourself until the right woman comes along. I do have a lot of women friends and go out just about every weekend, but I'm still waiting to find that special woman to get married to first and then get laid. :)
The software and hardware that drives my heart and lungs require 100% uptime.
How true. What other architecture has a single instruction for factorising polynomials.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I am glad to see that Slashdot community is immune to the specter of promiscuency that seems to rule today.
I regularly visit Slashdot, not because I share an interest in various "computer" arcana, or find obscure technical doodads interesting, but because here I find soulmates in my quest for celibacy.
I searched to and fro, and I haven't found so many virgins since I visited a eunuch seminary on an island with no girls.
Thank you for the motivation!
WhitePony
DECNET? Bah, too much work! :)
...hey wait a sec, NetBEUI sucks!! UGH! Darn broadcast protocols. What was I smoking back then?
I ran NetBEUI on a small company network for years. Want to know why? It wasn't routable.
The logic was you can't get compromised from the Internet if you cant route off network. Of course that's not true, but it really does make it harder for anyone to break in. Of course, that was before they discovered VPN's and Terminal Services, so NetBEUI went away and the network went all TCP/IP.
NetBEUI...good times...good times...
Allow me to translate this for the rest of you (*Disclaimer: I'M JOKING!*):
DECnet is often used these days for very mission critical applications. The firm I work for uses DECnet because it is the easiest and most reliable way for us to maintain our VAX and Alpha clusters.
Our network guys are so old they played spades with Moses. We haven't upgraded a server in 15 years, and that's the way we like it!
Indeed, it is by far the most superior form of networking out there for applications where the uptime must be literally 100%.
I can get double time and a half anytime I want since I convinced the CEO that our SQL server needed to be up 24/7.
We have had sales reps from various vendors come and suggest moving to a Windows 2003/PC setup (HAHA!) or towards a more UNIX/Linux-based setup.
The entire city's sales force is drooling over the possibility of snagging our contract once our old kit finally goes into meltdown.
But we will stick with our DECnet-based VAX and Alpha clusters because they are known to work, and they work pretty damn well!
But I'm one of those power-tripping BOFH's who won't let a Blackberry into the building without my say-so.
But that's because it is amongst the finest of DEC engineering. That's the sort of engineering you just don't find these days.
My dad played gold with Ken Olsen.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Like, when the operating system was like actually
- stable
- documented
- consistent, so that you could actually memorize commands and their options
Those were the days.I apologize for being an old fart, but having spent the last five years with Windows as my primary OS (after having been on VMS since 1985), I'm still emphatically unimpressed with what goes for "modern technology".
Of course there are things you can do on Windows or Unix that simply weren't available on VMS. But when it comes to reliability and sheer good design, I still very much miss VMS.
Like I said, I apologize. :-)
Christian Engström, Former Member of the European Parliament 2009-2014 for The Pirate Party, Sweden
sad news for you, OSI is just a model, a reference framework that no real world networking model follows
What, not even DECNET/OSI? I beg to differ - see this Wikipedia article - the OSI model got coded. The size of the manual set alone was enough to scare most programmers away, let alone their actual contents.
Bah.
It's pining for the fjords!
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.