At 4:55 PM -0700 7/30/03, Brad Hughes wrote: >Craig A. Berry wrote: >[...] >>Barring miraculous patch appearances, the following VMS-specific problems will stay >>with us for 5.8.1 final: >> >>Net::Ping won't work because of its dependence on fcntl(). It also depends on the >>presence of an echo server (port 7), which is not installed by default with HP >>TCP/IP Services, though it is with Multinet. > >This is a pretty serious failing. What does Win32 do, or do windows >boxes come with fcntl and an echo server?
Windows uses ioctl(), which should also work on VMS and was the basis of a patch I posted earlier in this thread. Tests are inconclusive; see my reply in a separate message to Mark Berryman. Windows does come with an echo service enabled by default. The absence of an echo service in TCP/IP Services is by design. When I first tried to address this issue a year or so ago, I posted a query in comp.os.vms. Matt Muggeridge of hpaq TCP/IP Engineering replied pointing out that echo servers are the primary targets of DoS attacks and any properly set up system will have the echo service disabled. They supply the source code for an echo service in TCPIP$EXAMPLES as a simple example of how to create your own service but recommend against having an echo server in a production environment. They do recommend use of icmp-based ping, which requires privs. The Net::Ping folks explicitly chose the echo port because it does not require privs and they wanted a ping facility that could be run from any Perl script. Obviously there's no way we can or should resolve this in a way that will satisfy everybody. With the exception of twiddling the non-blocking bit on a socket, Net::Ping works fine on VMS if you have an echo service running. If you don't it won't, and it's your choice. Yes, this should be documented somewhere. Patches welcome. -- ________________________________________ Craig A. Berry mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] "... getting out of a sonnet is much more difficult than getting in." Brad Leithauser
