2 Mar
2022
2 Mar
'22
3:31 p.m.
On Mar 2, 2022, at 12:58 AM, Dave McGuire
<mcguire(a)neurotica.com> wrote:
On 3/1/22 20:16, Paul Koning wrote:
True. That's not exactly what I meant, though.
On the one hand, remote viewing of management type state is already around and has been
for a while. There's NML support, so you can ask a PyDECnet node questions about its
state via NCP. There is also web based status info; you can see this at the HECnet map
server. None of that offers manageability in the sense of remotely *changing* things, and
at the moment I'm not working on that.
The API I was talking about offers some of the same capabilities as NML, but its more
sigificant function is to let you open and use DECnet NSP (session control) connections.
So if I bring up a PyDECnet node on my laptop I can then run NCP on that same laptop, and
connect to HECnet nodes via the API to ask them things. Ditto with NFT, and potentially
other protocols like CTERM or whatever else anyone may want to implement. Requiring the
application to be on the same host as a PyDECnet node is a bit of a limitation. For what
I do it isn't a big concern, but I was wondering if others would want to be able to
run things like NFT or NCP on a host different from where the PyDECnet instance is active.
paul
Question for PyDECnet users: as I mentioned,
there's a new API, cleaner than the old one. A major addition is access to the
Session Control layer, in other words external programs can talk to the API to use DECnet
communication services, inbound or outbound. This is how I implemented a simple subset
NCP and NFT.
That API runs over a Unix domain socket, in connection mode. It's quite similar to
TCP but inherently local to the machine where PyDECnet is running. That's nice for
security, of course. But on the other hand, it means that there isn't a way for a
PyDECnet running on one machine to offer a portal into DECnet for nearby machines. If you
keep a DECnet router in the basement, your laptop can't run NCP since it has no access
to that socket.
It would not be all that difficult to add an option for running that same API over a TCP
port, possibly with some sort of access filtering. Is there interest in such a thing?
I'm not a PyDECnet user yet, but I will say this, remote manageability is almost
always a good thing.