3 Jul
2019
3 Jul
'19
7:51 p.m.
It's nothing like VMS, but that is an extremely long and unfortunate
story.? DECnet appears to have been designed into VMS from the start and
appears well integrated whereas Tops-20's antecedents (TENEX) completely
predate DECnet.? The original networking interface was NCP: (I.E., ARPAnet).
In certain ways, Tops-20 DECnet appears as kind of a 'bolt-on', some of
it not fully productized.? The 7 series monitor code is robust, but the
user utilities are not fully documented and exhibit certain programming
flaws.? At Columbia we fixed a great deal of these, SPR'ed them and yet
the changes appear lost.? I used to have magtapes someplace...
I'll have a look at FAL; at first glance it has no hooks for a default
account, which would then allow complete system access.? I still have to
complete fixing the issue in DAP that causes it to break when listing
long directories (which triggers another glitch in GLXLIB...)?? DAP
seems strangely incomplete; it is missing code to do renames which
struck me as remarkable.
However, checking out what VMS does is never a bad idea.
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On 7/3/2019 11:36 AM, Robert Armstrong wrote:
I've no idea what TOPS20 does, but ...
On VMS the NETCONFIG script creates a default account for FAL called FAL$SERVER.
Anonymous access to FAL just logs in using this account and you can see whatever files are
in the associated login directory, typically SYS$SPECIFIC:[FAL$SERVER].
TOPS20 probably uses different names, but I imagine that the basic idea is similar...
Bob
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From: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE [mailto:owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE] On Behalf Of
Thomas DeBellis
Sent: Wednesday, July 3, 2019 5:15 AM
To: hecnet at Update.UU.SE
Subject: [HECnet] Anonymous FAL (Tops-20)
I have some software that I'd like to post, but don't recall how to configure FAL
to allow for an anonymous connection; to download from a restricted directory.
I know how to do it for the FTP server (seeing as I wrote it), but ... different code
base.
I can only vaguely remember what we did for CCnet at Columbia University in the
1980's, but I think it was kind of a hack.