[HECnet] Public Services over DECnet

[Supratim Sanyal]

Hi Mark,

Your email strikes a chord; I was exactly in this position a couple of 
years ago.

My experience with OpenVMS was mostly doing SYS$QIOs, ASTs and Event 
Flags controlling factory shop-floor equipment with not much of DECnet 
in the mid 90's; and I bailed to Unix/Linux/IP shortly before Robert 
Palmer completed the demise of Digital Equipment Corporation.

I have been playing around (got blocked from HECnet twice for 
inadvertently flooding the entire network with ethernet loopbacks while 
experimenting) and wanted to share my experience so far.

_File Sharing_

Anonymous file sharing is achieved using the File Access Listener 
service (FAL) that comes with DECnet implementations. Anonymity is 
achieved by proxy - this basically means you configure DECnet  to map 
anonymous users to a FAL user, and all files in this proxied FAL user's 
directory are then available publicly. You can do a "DIR <NODENAME>::" 
to almost any HECnet node and see the files their owners have made 
publicly available.

Installing FAL server on OpenVMS is a no brainer; the DECnet 
installation script will ask questions and set it up. Other operating 
systems are tricky to various degrees, but by all means go for it, it is 
exciting!

I have been experimenting on DECnet stacks on various operating systems, 
and so far have got FAL to work accessing files from other nodes on HECnet:

OpenVMS VAX 7.3:

     DIR QCOCAL::
     DIR CLOUDY::
     DIR IMPVAX::

OpenVMS Alpha 8.3:

     DIR RAPTOR::

RSX-11M-PLUS / PDP-11/24

     DIR JUICHI::

Linux Ubuntu 14:

     DIR FEDACH::
     DIR FOMFOR::

DEC Ultrix:

     DIR OSTARA::

Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 - _This actually returns the entire content of 
C:\WINNT\SYSTEM32, I do not know how to peg FAL server to a specific 
directory on Windows NT_:

     DIR ENTEE4::

Microsoft Windows XP  - Again, this returns the entire content of 
C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32!

     DIR ENTEE4::


_Forum/BBS/Conference__
_
DEC NOTES was, as mostly the case, pioneering and years ahead - I could 
get technical answers from across the world over the global EASYNET 
before the internet became popular. However I think there needs to be 
some NOTES servers somewhere on HECnet for the rest of us to launch 
NOTES and chat. Maybe there is one, I do not know, Johnny may.

_MUDS etc_

The OpenVMS freeware archives contain a few networked games - they are 
easy to install - I will gladly play with others as others will if you 
put them up!

_Web Server_

Not really DECnet, but if you have DEC TCP/IP for OpenVMS installed, 
both WASD and OSU HTTPD work fine. My examples - 
http://sanyalnet-openvms-vax.freeddns.org:82/ is served by WASD for 
OpenVMS/VAX 7.3 and http://sanyal.duckdns.org/ is served by OSU HTTPD on 
OpenVMS/Alpha 8.3.

Have a glorious 2018 playing with DECnet,

Supratim

On 12/30/2017 02:27, Mark J. Blair wrote:
> I come from a mostly-UNIX, mostly-TCP/IP background. I don't understand DECnet well yet, but I want to learn more! Much of my interest in joining HECnet and playing around is because I largely skipped over DECnet in its original airing, and now it seems like a weird foreign land that I feel an irrational need to grok in fullness.
>
> What are/were the conventions for providing public services over DECnet Phase IV networks, to remote users without their own local user accounts? I.e., let's say that I had a node on a large DECnet-only network back in the before time, and I wanted to share a file repository in a manner comparable to anonymous FTP on a TCP/IP network. How would I have done that? Were there conventions for doing that sort of thing back then, or was that a foreign concept on large DECnet networks at the time?
>
> Were there any examples of BBS-like servers living on DECnet networks? Online multi-player games such as MUDs? Early DECnet-based examples of "log into the coffee pot to see if the brew is fresh"? DECnet-based analogs to Archie for discovering stuff? DECnet-based USENET-like communities?
>
> I don't know if any of these concepts even made sense in the DECnet world at the time. In addition to only understanding the networks of the 80s from a UNIX-centric, TCP/IP-centric worldview, I'm also having a hard time un-thinking the newer concepts I'm used to after so many years of steeping in a broth of HTTP and social media. I have somewhat conflicting urges to both learn how to think like a 1980s DECnet user, and to retcon modern concepts into an alternate reality where TCP/IP never took off.
>

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.sonic.net/pipermail/hecnet-list/attachments/20171230/8e783172/attachment.html>