DCE/RPC NamedPipe Transport emulation

[Peter Samuelson]

[John E. Malmberg]
> So those on these lists that are not doing commercial development and
> can live with the HOBBY license conditions, adding an OpenVMS system
> to your home network can be done very cheaply.

Except ... I guess DEC discontinued the VAX some time ago, and Compaq
recently decided to drop the Alpha in favor of the HP/Intel IA-64.
[Insert hisses from the tech crowd.]  So is it actually still possible
to buy a new box supported by VMS?  Or do you have to get a used one
now?  (Of course, there should be lots of old vaxen on the market,
considering how many were in use in the past.)

> I have not tried DECNET on LINUX yet.  If the implementation is
> complete I will probably use it a lot, once I get a LINUX systems
> running again.

I don't think the implementation is complete, although I haven't tried
it.  My impression is that it only deals with sockets i.e. transport-
level access -- not with the filesystem, user authentication structure
or RPC.  (Presumably the RPC does not require much explicit kernel
support -- just a daemon to do listening, mapping and launching, like
inetd + portmap.)

That is, I believe you can use it for the 'rlogin'-type stuff, but
maybe not much more.  You'd have to check.

> An official X11 transport.

That would depend on the X libraries supporting DECnet, which would at
the least require a recompile of Xlib.  I do not know if the current
XFree86 source distribution of the X libraries supports DECnet.  I'm
guessing it does, since the code was inherited from the X Consortium,
of which DEC was a card-carrying member ... but it may have fallen into
disuse and bitrot since those days.

Peter