awpsys@ultb.isc.rit.edu (Andrew W. Potter) (02/22/90)
I just got back from a demo at our nearest ACT of the DEC VT1000 X terminal that was announced last week. I was able to convince the marketteers to let me play with it for a while and here are my observations. The Terminal uses the new LK401 keyboard (nice) and is in a Box about 1.5 inches thick about 1/2 the height of a VAX(DEC)station 3100 box. The ones I saw were the 15 and 19 inch monochrome versions. No color yet. The terminal currently supports an X11R3 server, and uses TCP/IP and LAT as an X transport (No DECnet yet...soon they say). On power up the terminal does its self test and comes up with a DECwindows-like session manager and has the ability to create LOCAL VT320 terminals. These terminals can connect via the LAT protocol or TCP/IP TELNET to any LAT or TCP host. This has the VERY nice advantage of running the terminal manager (which is quite CPU hoggish on VMS or Ultrix) locally on the X terminal. Furthermore, you can make a lot of windowed terminal sessions that can connect to hosts which don't even have any X client applications (I.E VMS 4.n systems). The X terminal will access font libraries via a LAT protocol based font server (not MOP) or a from a TFTP server. there are about 16 fonts in ROM. The boxes come with one Meg of Local ram (about 2.5 Meg of code in ROM) with the ability to expand to 4 meg of RAM. All indications are that the systems will need 2 meg or better to support a reasonable number of local sessions. You also have the ability to to initiate an X protocol connection via LAT or TCP/IP to the host of your choice. When you do this, the familiar DECwindows session manager login prompt shows up on your screen. You log in as if you were a workstation and from that point on, you have all the features of X and DECwindows that a workstation user has. On VMS (V5.3-1 or later) you see LAT as the transport when you do a SHOW DISPLAY command. Since the X terminal does not support DECnet transport yet, you cannot directly access X client applications VMS systems prior to V5.3-1. DEC is providing a DECnet to LAT transport gateway that you can run on a a V5.3-1 system to run your X application on a V5.1 or 5.2 system. This problem will go away when DEC upgrades it to support DECnet. Ultrix won't suffer this problem because it uses TCP/IP. One neat feature is the way the local X terminal session manager "hands off" its local windows to the VMS or Unix session manager after you log into VMS or Ultrix DECwindows. If the remote session manager dies, rather then locking your windows in place, the X terminal will fall back to using its local Session manager. We proved this by STOP/IDing the session manager after having a bunch of windows (local LAT and remote) created. One serious problem I have seen is the inability to secure the X terminal setups. Specifically any VT1000 user can walk up and set ANY TCP/IP host address that they want. Furthermore, the user has full control over the LAT group codes that are visible. This will undermine all sites that have implemented LAT group codes as a mechanism to limit host access. Finally if DEC has not resolved this problem by the time they implement a DECnet transport for the box, then users will be able to screw up DECnet addresses. This rubs me wrong in two areas. First is the obvious security concern if a malicious user wants to corrupt network traffic to and from a valid network host. Second is the more subtle problem of a naive user plugging one of these boxes into the net and picking addresses out of a hat. After all DEC is marketing these things as TERMINALS yet network managers will need to treat and trust these things like real network hosts. - Andy -- Andrew W. Potter Bitnet: awpsys@ritvax.BITNET Systems Programmer Internet: awpsys@ultb.isc.rit.edu Information Systems and Computing Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester NY, 14623 (716) 475-6994
emv@math.lsa.umich.edu (Edward Vielmetti) (02/22/90)
In article <2283@ultb.isc.rit.edu> awpsys@ultb.isc.rit.edu (Andrew W. Potter) writes:
I just got back from a demo at our nearest ACT of the DEC VT1000
X terminal that was announced last week. I was able to convince the
marketteers to let me play with it for a while and here are my observations.
...
The boxes come with one Meg of Local ram (about 2.5 Meg of code in ROM)
with the ability to expand to 4 meg of RAM. All indications are that
the systems will need 2 meg or better to support a reasonable number of
local sessions.
Did you find out what sort of memory modules this terminal
will take? Are they the 1 MB commodity SIMMS that you can
get for less than $100 these days street price or some
horrible DEC proprietary design ? Did they say whether the
design would accomodate 4 MB devices?
--Ed