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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.
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.
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
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
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
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'
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.