[HECnet] Public Services over DECnet

[Johnny Billquist]

Catching up on more mails that had ended up in the wrong folder at my end...

On 2017-12-30 08:27, 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.

DECnet is similar in some ways, and different from TCP/IP in other ways. 
The only way to learn is by testing... So have fun...

> 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?

File access in DECnet is not really like ftp. Think of it more closely 
to SMB or NFS. In VMS it is fully integrated into the OS. Any file 
access can just as well access a file over DECnet as a local file. A 
full filename specification includes the node name as well.
VMS can have a default DECnet account, which would be used if an unknown 
user connected for file access. Others also mentioned proxy access, 
which is a way of mapping users on one system to other users on another 
system. This can also be used for setting up default access if no 
username is given.

And to explain this in full, a filename looks like this:

NODE"user password"::DEV:[DIR]FILE.EXT;VER

And if a user and password is not given, if outgoing proxy is enabled, 
the remote node can use incoming proxy to remap you into some other 
local user on that machine. If no proxy is enabled, the remote node can 
potentially also use some default account, or access can be denied.

> 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?

BBS like services? The only one I know of would be VMS NOTES. NOTES is 
also the closes to something USENET-like. Then you have PHONE, which is 
a bit like Unix talk. And mail of course...

The only multiplayer game I ever saw was FLIGHT, which was a multiuser 
flight simulator for VMS workstations. But there might have been others. 
Don't know...

As others also said, remote control of both batch jobs, and running 
tasks in general is pretty easy in DECnet. (There was a bit more trust 
back then, even if it did require authentication.)

> 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.

Good luck. :-)

   Johnny

-- 
Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                   ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se             ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol