cacroft@drls21.mit.EDU (C. A. Croft[Cheryl]) (07/26/88)
We currently have an environment consisting of 1) Suns which support TCP/IP and DECnet (Sunlink DNI) and 2) VAXes, some of which only support DECnet. I naively thought that by including the DDNETCONN flag in util/imake.includes/Sun.macros, I could enable the VAX clients to communicate with the Sun servers and vice versa. Unfortunately, I seem to be missing a critical piece in the form of _dnet_conn. Can anyone tell me what this is and where I can find it? Thanks. Cheryl Croft umb006@sc.msc.umn.edu or ...convex!drlc1!cacroft (214) 851-8479
darin@taurus.laic.uucp (Darin Johnson) (07/27/88)
In article <8807252042.AA00785@drls21.sun.com>, cacroft@drls21.mit.EDU (C. A. Croft[Cheryl]) writes: > We currently have an environment consisting of 1) Suns which support > TCP/IP and DECnet (Sunlink DNI) and 2) VAXes, some of which only support > DECnet. I naively thought that by including the DDNETCONN flag in > util/imake.includes/Sun.macros, I could enable the VAX clients to communicate > with the Sun servers and vice versa. Unfortunately, I seem to be missing a > critical piece in the form of _dnet_conn. Can anyone tell me what this is and > where I can find it? Unfortunately, the DECnet supported with the X11 releases assumes a different DECnet than the Suns support. The X11 release seems to support a version of DECnet that is integrated into the BSD "socket" paradigm. Suns version uses a different method for programming (although read()/write() work the same once a connection is made). Since my company is very heavily VAX/VMS, all UNIXoid machines have to have DECnet if they want to talk to a VAX, rather than putting TCP on the VAX (this is because departments buy the DECnet software for the UNIX machines. For a multiple-department VAX, no-one wants to foot the bill for TCP). Since we are also planning on getting DECwindows on most of the VAXen, many people will want to have X on Suns, etc. talk to the VAXen. So some sort of Sun DECnet interface in X11 would go over very well (any volunteers?). (I may be paranoid, but from my experience with DEC, I have a brooding feeling that they will add just enough extensions to X that the DECwindow interface will not work on non-DEC machines. Since DEC cares little about communicating with machines other than DEC, IBM, or Apple, they may not really care if Suns, etc. can be servers for X11.) Darin Johnson (...pyramid.arpa!leadsv!laic!darin) (...ucbvax!sun!sunncal!leadsv!laic!darin) "All aboard the DOOMED express!"
jg@jumbo.dec.com (Jim Gettys) (07/27/88)
The DECnet implementation in the MIT release was implemented on Ultrix, where DECnet is fully integrated into the BSD socket mechanism. The dnet_conn routine is a library routine which, for DECnet, does about a page worth's of socket related system calls to set up the connection (sure would be nice if there were an inet_conn routine in the library...). It would be nice if other DECnet implementations used the same programming interface, but I guess that's being too rational :-) to expect. Seeing that implementing DECnet support for X for the first time in took us one afternoon, I can't imagine it being too hard at least on the client side; the server side may be a bit more entertaining but I've never looked at the DECnet on Sun's. - Jim Gettys Systems Research Center
haynes@WSL.DEC.COM (07/29/88)
Digital has publicly stated its commitment to the X standard and its intention to provide DECwindows on other vendor's platforms. Applications conforming to the X protocol will be able to talk to Digital servers, and DECwindows applications will be able to run on other machines. -- Charles