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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."
IP, though, is the industry standard protocol. These days, everybody knows how to use TCP/IP. That means anyone also deploying DECnet has to license both protocols. The good news is that the DECnet fees are a bit less than those for TCP/IP.
Did I miss something? So far as I know, the specifications for TCP, IP, and (most) assorted support protocols are openly avaliable, free of charge to implement, screw up, use and abuse. Is this suggesting DECnet fees involve someone paying you to use it? If that's the case, sign me up!
This flies in the face of science.
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. Indeed, it is by far the most superior form of networking out there for applications where the uptime must be literally 100%.
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. 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 that's because it is amongst the finest of DEC engineering. That's the sort of engineering you just don't find these days.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
...richie - It is a good day to code.
The OpenVMS implementation of TCP/IP and DECnet must be licensed seperately from the operating system. That is what they mean. The OpenVMS TCP/IP implementation costs less than the OpenVMS DECnet implementation.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
The coming of OSI and it's asinine 7-layer model stiltified DECnet in the 90's. I'm sure that being OSI-compliant was a big deal at the time, but nobody cares anymore. And other than crossing the t's and dotting the i's to meet some government spec at the time, nobody really wanted it.
Before OSI, DECnet was sleek, widespread, easy, and portable across many platforms.
After OSI compliance, it was sluggish, cantankerous, difficult, and verbose.
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!
I guess if you wanted to keep really sensitive stuff from being seen, you could PIX your application server and behind that, everything runs on DECnet behind the application server.
But, if you're going to do that anyway... you could just as well use Appletalk, VINES or NetBIOS (w/o TCPIP) instead of DECnet... neither of which would be visible to outsiders.
None of this will save you from VBS attacking desktops. Email is email, whether it came in over IP, a floppy disk, or DECnet.
That's because it is a Windows box running on an old PC. Indeed, PCs in general cannot be trusted with essential data. That is because PCs are a commodity item designed to be low in cost, and to work just well enough to outlive their warranty.
Systems from DEC and IBM, from the 1970s, are known to work very well even today. That is because they were engineered for reliability, quality, and extremely long lives (40+ years). That is why they can be trusted with critical data, even decades after they were manufactured, while a seven year old PC is most likely sitting in a closet broken, leaking mercury.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Stumbled onto a VMS/DECNet machine and want to explore a little? First try "show known nodes", and then... our friends at Phrack have a HOWTO guide, including a copy of the all-important "TELL.COM".
-Mark: (remembers VMS) && (age > 25)
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
To an operating system with TCP/IP, DECNET, IPX and SNA support -
OS/2
In the early 90's, if you wanted, you could get OS/2 to load a whole pile of transport protocols - which was pretty much necessary for the alphabet soup that ran client-server apps back then. In fact, Doom ran on IPX/SPX before it ran in TCP/IP.
Those who wished to mock VMS would say "VMS Only has two commands, SET and LOGOUT"
Sadly, SET was terribly overloaded ... SET DEFAULT was how you changed (among other things) your current working directory; logging into another host across the network was SET HOST; disabling traps in a .com file was SET NOON;
I loved VMS, not because it was a speedy lightweight OS (it was absolutely the opposite in every way) ; but it was the friendliest OS out there for the hard-core assembly language programmer, and the VAX has an architecture that makes programming in assembly a joy.
How does the Slashdot Effect happen given that no slashdotters ever RTFA?
Yeah, I remember DECnet. The coolest thing about it is that it required you to have a special DECnet MAC address for every Ethernet port on each host. The good news is that this led to widespread Ethernet MAC reprogrammability...
As a user of the linux decnet stack, I would say the Linux decnet stack works pretty well for talking to old VAXen. There are still places with old VAX computer embedded in equipment that would take millions to replace. The Navy is using Charon VAX http://www.softresint.com/charon-vax/ in some places to keep from having to replace the attached hardware. SIMH http://simh.trailing-edge.com/ works very well for emulating a vax, but is software only. A vax emulation running on SIMH on linux can talk decnet, and so can the linux machine it runs on. However, because DECNET sets the mac address as the decnet address, the Linux's decnet can't talk to the SIMH running on it. So, I had to put tcp/ip on the simulator to get them to talk. It would be nice if Linux's emulator could set it's mac address at runtime, and have several, so it could to the routing, and talk to the SIMH emulator, but it isn't possible now.
Ol' Rick Dawson had a farm EIEIO
Alpha is dead, but DECnet lives on.
*sigh*
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
Yes, TCP/IP has not evolved these layers at all. In stead, TCP/IP users are forced to accept that TCP/IP only provides reliable socket-based bi-directional streams of data routed world wide. Meanwhile in stead of being comfortably locked into a proprietary system, they face the challenge of choosing which applications to use to manage their sessions, presentation and file transfer.
HTTP(S), WebDAV, (S)FTP, SSH, SOAP, JMS, BXXP, XMPP, RTSP, SIP, NFS, SMB, NNTP, IMAP, etc. etc. And all of these protocols come with their own strengths and weaknesses! Worse, you could even swap TCP/IP out from underneath some of these protocols in favor of, for example, IPv6 or in some cases even an old dinosaur like NetBIOS.
To make matters worse, all these protocols come with easy-to use APIs, libraries, executable tools and even multi-vendor support, so far as to even be integrated into development environments such as "Java" or "Perl"..
The obvious drawback of this is of course that relying on these, for the most part, "open standards" makes it easier for your software to interoperate and be compatible across platforms and networks.
Next article written by Captain Obvious; "Many enterprises using Windows file sharing to replicate mission-critical information across Windows systems."
(Not that there's anything wrong with being lazy and using the OS' default transparant network thingamajig.. But that's not exactly winning on merits)
Now, if any one has any information as why DECnet is (supposedly) so much more robust and dependable than TCP/IP (especially DECnet-over-IP), I'd like to hear it. Does it use error correcting codes? Does it have some sort of secDNS equivalent (or even an analog to secure BGP? that would be kinda neat).
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
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. :)
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...
I am 25, and were it not for random chance, I wouldn't know anything about DECnet. Until the the MicroVAX 3500 at work lost its boot drive in a power outage - 1.5 months ago - we actively used DECnet; The VAX primarily served software images to DECservers, which our old HP-UX server did most of the communication. I still have the hulking pair of RA81 behind me. We had several DECwriter III (LA120) paper-feed terminals that we used as wide-carriage impact printers for shipping documents and labels, and two large Line Matrix greenbar printers.
:)
During the transition and move (all obtained from a previous company) several pieces stopped working. As I understand it, they'd been robbing pieces right and left to keep what was working still working. I poured through manuals as old as I am, and dug up default passwords. Thankfully, they weren't exactly security-conscious.
Anyone want a MicroVAX? You pay shipping.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Let's not forget about the old X.25 Telenet network which is still publicly accessible. A few years back myself and a friend of mine wrote an NUA scanner to poke around Telenet and see what's out there. We were awfully surprised to see that there were many systems still openly accessible. Not only that but we also found that there were a plethora of freely available PADs in most major cities. At one point we had compiled a list of several hundred of these numbers and methodically began mapping out large portions of the network. I would fully recomend those who are interested in arcane forms of networking to dig into this a little further. You may be pleasantly surprised.
The projects I've worked for the last 8 years or so have used VAX and Alpha VMS and I can say that the much-vaunted uptime for VMS tends to be exaggerated. Yes VMS is generally solid, that I won't argue. However, it is very vulnerable to HW failure, just like anything else, and maybe more so than anything else we have around. We have had many many instances of a rogue VAXStation or microVAX taking out an entire cluster, redundancy and all. I see that as unacceptable.
... bleh.
You might say it must have been a admin/config problem. Weeeellll maybe (those guys seem to really know their sh-t cold, but one never knows) but then if it's that easy to misconfigure, how reliable is it really? And have you ever tried FINDING people that can maintain this stuff?
Lately we've been migrating off to the wintel world (and to some SGI as well) and the uptime numbers really have not changed that much. Some windows services tend to go down more often than their VMS equivalent, but things are mostly the same. The only reason we have to keep VAXen around is legacy applications that would be very very hard to port off of VMS. Anyone who has ever had to convert a G-Float to an IEEE double in order to use old VAX centric data sets know what I'm talking about here
"There's no secret. You just press the accelerator to the floor and keep turning left." -- Bill Vukovich
Being a Christian means saving yourself until the right woman comes along.
No, it doesn't.
It was the story of Data General's response to the VAX. DG saw the VAX as a 32 machine with 16 bit support (PDP-11 support) hanging off the side. DG wanted to extend their existing 16 bit technology naturally to 32 bits. They did it too.
DG was better technology, but the VAX was beautiful. VMS was a joy.
Very entertaining book, if a bit dramatized. It's the story of the invention of the then-modern VAX system in the late 1970s. Guess what, they used emulation technology, just like VMWare et al. Required reading in my college 15 years ago.
Heh, then you were high in college. The company was Data General and they were making a VAX competitor...
toresbe
VAX/VMS had 64-bit computing, seamless virtual memory management, no root superuser, granular permissions, clustering, and all the other stuff *nix is just getting now (thanks to Hans Reiser, Ted T'so, Linus Torvalds and friends) decades ago. VMS was also the first POSIX-compliant system, didja realize that?
The problems with VMS were that it was expensive and closed source, and it was unfriendly to people whose native language was not English (which is why Torvalds hated it, incidentally).
I left unix for VMS because the unix geeks were condescending and unable to admit their OS had flaws, which made it impossible to fix them. I left VMS for linux because the linux geeks were actually addressing the fundamental flaws of unix.
In an attempt to satisfy the federal government, DEC actually implemented the OSI reference model. The whole bloody thing, as documented by the model itself, which is how the world found out it is a bad idea.
I've installed it. I've used it. I remember the whole GOSIP debacle. I remember ripping it out by the roots and reinstalling DECnet Phase IV - which was excellent, although a bit bursty on low bandwidth links.
Excellent question! Piddling little things like performance
and does-my-router-know-it aside, the DECNet wasn't
just a protocol, it was an enhanced user experience.
Instead of just transferring files, you could refer to a
file on a foreign computer by name (a facility similar
to our DNS (domain name system)). The network access
was transparent.
So, every file open of "file" opened the file in your
current default directory.
Open "directory/file" and you can get the file in a subdirectory
Open "disk:directory/file" and you get the file on a specific
rooted filesystem (other disk drive, usually)
And, open "outofstate::disk:directory/file" and you have
access to any known node (other computer) whose disk
and directory are readable (permitted) through the network.
The beauty of it is, there's no need to recompile the program,
just to feed it the string (filename and other info all go into
the same OPEN command).
Everyone using the internet with named URLs (universal
resource locators) and DNS (domain name service) has
similar capabilities nowadays, but DECNet users had it
two decades ago. And they had it in ALL cases of file
access. You could tell the help utility to read
helpfiles from Stanford's SSRL physics lab, or tell the
print output to go to a teletype in Maine.
And DECNet used (originally) mainly LAT networking protocols,
not TCP/IP, because it predates the internet; I have a short
stack of LAT network boxes that don't know TCP/IP, but
they'd be hard to replace this week (and they're all 10base2 or
somesuch, which is another issue...). There's nothing
intrinsically LAT-based about the DECNET, it's just the
historically original pairing; I presume DECNet and TCP/IP
are mainly cooperative these days.
It's pining for the fjords!
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Yes, it certainly does.
"Christian" doesn't mean following the rules you like, and ignoring the ones you don't. Many people like to call themselves Christians and ignore the rules, but that's completely different.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I have no problem with creimer's view, because he is doing what he wants to do. You, however, have insulted me as well as the intelligence and dedication of many people.
Get you unfounded dogma off of public places. Or, put your money where your mouth is, and prove what you just said.
I'll bet you $100 (no kidding) that you can't defend your position with passages (not just quotes) from the Bible. And, for an even easier bet for you, I'll bet you $1 and let you defend your statement with any Christian references you want to use, even modern works. Bear in mind, I'll use my own references to rebut. You won't even win $1, my Christian friend, because you can't.
And while we're on the way offtopic subject of ignoring rules, at what point did you decide that the rules in the Old Testament didn't apply to Christians? Did you read it between the lines?
Or maybe you should spend your time thinking for yourself, instead of blindly following rules set down by people almost a thousand years ago. You're certainly not following the path of the original Christian church, but instead agreeing with the statements made during the Middle Ages, for two reasons.
First of all, you're not going to find anything about a prophet or Christ demanding virginity. Virginity was not an issue so much until the Middle Ages, for various reasons. Why don't you read some history? It could help your outlook on life.
Second of all, what you will find, if you check the original Hebrew and Greek, is that Jesus, an unmarried man, had sex, as did at least one of his disciples. Was it okay for them, but not you? Were times different then?
Playing pornographics games during the day is evil! Play at night!