> On Apr 30, 2019, at 9:25 AM, Paul Koning via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org>
> wrote:
>
>
>
>> On Apr 29, 2019, at 9:05 PM, Grant Taylor via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org>
>> wrote:
>>
>> On 4/29/19 6:47 PM, Zane Healy via cctalk wrote:
>>> I want to say that the OSU webserver for VMS supports running over DECnet,
>>> but my memory could be faulty. I’ve only used WASD on VMS.
>>
>> I think this sounds like a neat ~> fun thing to do.
>>
>> But how does a web server run over DECnet?
>>
>> I guess conceptually you can serve web pages across any protocol that can
>> carry HTTP.
>>
>> But I guess you could also have a client that ran over DECnet or need a
>> gateway to TCP/IP.
>
> Yes. What I meant is that one could take an existing HTTP client and server,
> or create one, substituting DECnet sockets for the TCP sockets. The protocol
> would work just fine that way. You'd need to decide how to deal with DECnet
> packet boundaries, something TCP doesn't have (a major omission). The
> simplest is to pay no attention to them, which is what I understand Ultrix
> "streaming DECnet" sockets to do. An alternative would be to make use of
> them, for example by saying that the entire HTTP header is in one packet and
> the payload (if any) follows in separate packets.
>
> paul
>
>
DECnet-Ultrix SOCK_STREAM sockets completely ignore message boundaries on both
input and output. Early on we ran X-windows over DECnet just by changing the
socket address family and the connect/accept logic. Very early on we had to
test with SOCK_STREAM since DECnet was the first (and only?) protocol to make
use of SOCK_SEQPACKET sockets and there was a crash lurking in the 4.2BSD
kernel socket code for such sockets.
John.
