[HECnet] Effects of Rogue Duplicate HECnet Node?

[Thomas DeBellis]

I never heard of DECnet on SCO, but we ran Ultrix on the first (8650) 
and second (8700) VAX's which we got at the data center for 
instructional use.  My last use of SCO in the early 2000's timeframe 
struck me as a product that was behind the times.  It still didn't have 
some features that Ultrix had; Linux and Digital Unix (1990's Alpha) had 
far passed it by.

As I recall, Ultrix would accept node"user password account"::, the 
account being necessary because the 20's ran real accounting.  I don't 
remember the functionality being used much.  Since we got burned with 
the cancellation of the 2080, we were not inclined to get locked into 
Digital anything, so no LAT anything.  For terminals, we had an 
alternate hardware solution (Gandalf PACX) which was more flexible in 
some ways that could also connect to our IBM mainframes.  For files, the 
vastly additional functionality of DAP was never leveraged; we stuck 
with FTP.  We discouraged node"user password account":: as this would 
allow shoulder surfing.  We may have modified some of the Ultrix source 
to refuse this nomenclature.

Shortly after we got an 8700, we got our first SPARC and essentially 
exited any Digital solution afterwards.  DEC tried very hard to keep the 
account; we got a large number of micro-vaxes, Pro-350's and the like.  
I had a micro-vax (running Ultrix) for about 8 months before I left and 
I thought it quite a reasonable little box.  The Pro-350's weren't 
really appreciated, this perhaps mostly due to the strange keyboard 
which didn't have common keys where they have been for decades.  In 
retrospect, I wonder about that as the keyboard wasn't any stranger than 
an IBM 3270, which I also used to tweak the HASP (PDP-11) code on the VM 
side.

I also used that functionality with our IBM system programmer staff 
troubleshoot IBMSPL when it got cranky, which happened a lot in early 
releases.  That surprised me as I had known one of the authors (K. Reti) 
at Marlboro and he had always struck me as pretty brilliant.  But I was 
young and impressionable.

I'm not sure what happened with CCnet after the Columbia data center got 
out of the Digital.  We had at least one VAX 11/780 on campus 
(Chemistry), but I don't know what they did.  Digital had better luck 
with Stevens; for a time, every undergraduate was _required_ to buy a 
350 in order to be able to do homework and graduate.

What's strange is what has lasted.  To this day, you can sign on to IBM 
mainframe and the only terminal that is supported is a 3270, half 
duplex.  They all speak IP6 and HTTPS and everything else, but if you 
are going to write a program under TSO...

On 3/5/20 8:09 AM, Johnny Billquist wrote:
> On 2020-03-04 20:59, John Forecast wrote:
>>
>>> On Mar 3, 2020, at 10:38 PM, Robert Armstrong <bob at jfcl.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> The area.node notation, and the Phase 3 numeric address notation, were
>>>> intended to be standard, not just limited to NCP.  And indeed DECnet/E
>>>> (in RSTS) does both:
>>>
>>>   FWIW, VMS accepts all three notations too - e.g. ZITI::, 2.16:: and
>>> 2064::.  It also accepts the node"name password":: notation as well.
>>> Actually I thought this was a standard thing in all "modern" (i.e. 
>>> Phase IV)
>>> implementations.  Are there systems that don't?
>>>
>>>   And the VMS parser doesn't limit the node name to 6 characters, so 
>>> you can
>>> say "63.1023::" (although HECnet has no such node).
>>>
>>> Bob
>>>
>>
>> Here’s a few more:
>>
>> DECnet-RSX
>>
>>     Kernel interface requires a node name (up to 6 characters) so can 
>> only connect to nodes which are in the system database.
>>     Access control uses the syntax nodename/user/password/account::
>
> I think access control allows either nodename/user/password/account:: or
> nodename"user password":: everywhere.
>
> However, only NCP allows numeric addresses. Anything else needs the 
> nodename. But within NCP you can play using node numbers everywhere 
> just fine.
>
>   Johnny
>
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