[HECnet] Anonymous FAL (Tops-20)

[Thomas DeBellis]

It's nothing like VMS, but that is an extremely long and unfortunate 
story.  DECnet appears to have been designed into VMS from the start and 
appears well integrated whereas Tops-20's antecedents (TENEX) completely 
predate DECnet.  The original networking interface was NCP: (I.E., ARPAnet).

In certain ways, Tops-20 DECnet appears as kind of a 'bolt-on', some of 
it not fully productized.  The 7 series monitor code is robust, but the 
user utilities are not fully documented and exhibit certain programming 
flaws.  At Columbia we fixed a great deal of these, SPR'ed them and yet 
the changes appear lost.  I used to have magtapes someplace...

I'll have a look at FAL; at first glance it has no hooks for a default 
account, which would then allow complete system access.  I still have to 
complete fixing the issue in DAP that causes it to break when listing 
long directories (which triggers another glitch in GLXLIB...)   DAP 
seems strangely incomplete; it is missing code to do renames which 
struck me as remarkable.

However, checking out what VMS does is never a bad idea.

> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> On 7/3/2019 11:36 AM, Robert Armstrong wrote:
>
>    I've no idea what TOPS20 does, but ...
>
>    On VMS the NETCONFIG script creates a default account for FAL called FAL$SERVER.  Anonymous access to FAL just logs in using this account and you can see whatever files are in the associated login directory, typically SYS$SPECIFIC:[FAL$SERVER].
>
>    TOPS20 probably uses different names, but I imagine that the basic idea is similar...
>
> Bob
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> From: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE [mailto:owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE] On Behalf Of Thomas DeBellis
> Sent: Wednesday, July 3, 2019 5:15 AM
> To: hecnet at Update.UU.SE
> Subject: [HECnet] Anonymous FAL (Tops-20)
>
> I have some software that I'd like to post, but don't recall how to configure FAL to allow for an anonymous connection; to download from a restricted directory.
>
> I know how to do it for the FTP server (seeing as I wrote it), but ... different code base.
>
> I can only vaguely remember what we did for CCnet at Columbia University in the 1980's, but I think it was kind of a hack.
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