[HECnet] PSTHRU object 123

[G.]

Hello everyone, :)

	while doing some housekeeping in one of my VMS systems I just came
across the PSTHRU.EXE DECnet tool for VAX which I downloaded from some place
I could not remember anymore, maybe some freeware collection.

PSTHRU.EXE implements DECnet PMR (Poor's Man Routing), i.e. the ability to
specify a route directly in the connection string, that was especially
useful when dealing with hidden areas because it relieved both users and
system managers from the need to have accounts on any intermediate
system(s). In simpler words it allows for things like the following:

$ SET HOST GATEWY::OTHRGW::HIDDEN::

With the exception of FAL and MAIL, whenever DECnet finds that a connection
string to some remote network object contains a list of nodes rather than
just one, it redirects that connection request to object 123 on the leftmost
node of the list. There, PSTHRU forwards the connection to the next node on
the list (either to object 123 or to the actual intended object, depending
on how many nodes are left to be passed through), and so on until the source
could be connected to its intended target. For different reasons both FAL
and MAIL have their own way of doing PMR and thus do not require PSTHRU or
anything similar for it to work.

Now the question is: does anyone have the source of PSTHRU.EXE (does it
exist at all?) and/or does anyone have an Alpha version of that image?

Also, by looking at a dump of PSTHRU.EXE it appears that it contains some
reference to some PSTHRU.DAT, so another question is: does anyone know how
to use it? I suspect that it could be a file where complex paths could be
listed so that one wouldn't have to remember all of them...

Thanks!
G.