On Jun 7, 2012, at 6:55 AM, Mark Benson wrote: On 7 Jun 2012, at 11:42, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote: On 06/07/2012 06:37 AM, Sampsa Laine wrote: Howabout starting it as a daemon (running as root) via the boot scripts, and have non-root users's programs access it via a socket? Cool idea - you could even have multiple hosts connect this way but export one DECNET endpoint, i.e. run CTERM on Box A whilst FAL goes to Box B, and MAIL to Box C :) Yes, you could multiplex/demultiplex it any way you wanted. It would open up all sorts of interesting configuration possibilities. ... and all this without needing to dick with the kernel? Sounds like a plan gentlemen, so now all we need is a long suffering coder type to do all the hard work ;) The main difference I can see vs. having the implementation in the kernel is that the kernel one gives you an integrated API. DecNET/Linux uses sockets, so an existing socket based app can be made to run over DECnet with potentially very little work. On the other hand, a userland implementation would need a different mechanism for the communication between the application and the DECnet daemon. paul