[HECnet] Anonymous FAL (Tops-20)

[Paul Koning]

> On Jul 4, 2019, at 3:39 PM, Robert Armstrong <bob at jfcl.com> wrote:
> 
>> Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote:
>> NETACP in RSX (and I suspect VMS) is just the process/program that 
>> implements a lot of the DECnet protocols. It is actually pretty much not 
> <related to anything here.
> 
>  When somebody tries to connect to, say, FAL, it's NETACP that receives the incoming connection request.  NETACP creates a process and runs FAL in that process to handle the rest of the job, BUT since NETACP creates the process it's also the one that decides what username to use and logs in the process (if necessary).  It's the one that handles the default account; FAL doesn't have to worry about that.

RSTS is somewhat similar, except it doesn't have the notion of ACP; the work is done in the kernel.  An inbound connection creates a job, and the kernel logs that in according to the supplied credentials, if they match and the account parameters permit network connections.  Default account is part of that.

The exception is objects set to use old style (Phase III era) access control, where the access control arguments were passed to the program and it would check them and issue the login syscall.  But none of the DEC-supplied objects use that any longer because it loses a bunch of functionality.

	paul