On 8/2/22 1:56 PM, Robert Armstrong via cctalk wrote:
AFAIK, VMS was the only DEC operating system (well, excepting the Un*x derivatives) that supported TCP/IP. There were several third party TCP/IP implementations for VMS (e.g. Wollongong, CMU, Process Software, ...) and eventually DEC came out with their own official implementation.
Isn't Tru64 a DEC product? Doesn't it support TCP/IP? I assume that it also supports DECnet.
I naively assume similar about Ultrix.
Johnny Bilquist has a TCP suite for RSX, but that's a recent development and was never a DEC product.
:-)
You mean now, today, for actual real work? I have no idea, but I doubt it's very many if any at all.
Ya, that's what I was trying to figure out.
There are some of us hobbyists out there though, that still use DECnet. We even have a worldwide DECnet network tunneled over the Internet, and it's useful for some of us to have DECnet on Linux.
Understood and agreed.
I have such a machine here, with Ubuntu 16.04.7LTS and ESM, kernel 4.4.0-148. I would have upgraded it, but getting some of the user mode DECnet programs to run on later releases is problematic. Not impossible, but tricky.
Please expound on what impact you would have if DECnet was removed from the /current/ mainline kernel?
Would you stop using DECnet b/c it was removed from the kernel? Or would you continue to use DECnet on an older kernel that still includes support for it?
I've recently run into this with some old Token Ring hardware that I was messing with. I did a recent install of a distro that was 15 years old and it worked perfectly for what I needed.
Are you part of the kernel team?
Nope. I'm just some random person on the Internet that has opinions and / or questions that are hopefully on topic.
I'm not really suggesting that DECnet support be kept, although there are a few of us who would appreciate it.
I have oft wondered about using DECnet for a few different things. Likewise with OSI and IPX. But I do think that I would be perfectly content running things in UML w/ L2 network access and / or VMs running old versions that still support hardware.
-- Grant. . . . unix || die
