[comp.os.vms] LAT sets DIALUP

WILLIAMS_B@svax05.pfizer-central-research.co.UK (07/22/87)

>Sender: leichter-jerry%arpa.yale-venus@arpa.yale-eng-venus

>My, my.  Mr. Williams, welcome to the real world in which different people
>have different configurations.  It's impossible to make EVERYONE happy.  There
>are tons of people out there with real, live modems connected to their LAT
>servers.  Anyone connecting in through such a port SHOULD be classified as
>DIALUP user.

They aren't made happier by drastic changes in maintenance updates which
are not referenced in the release notes, causing hours of work wasted
involving a reversion and cluster reboot.

>It gets worse:  What happens when you can dial in to the terminal switch, then
>connect to the LAT - in addition to having local connections to the switch?
>That's the case at this installation....  For this kind of configuration, not
>even a LAT option that allowed you to set a port to DIALUP or not by hand
>would help - there would literally be no way at all to tell if a connection
>was local or remote, short of checking the switch to see where "the other
>side" was connected to.

There are plenty of dialback modem security systems for such cases...
a far more flexible solution. Otherwise, the whole thing should be controlled
by a SYSGEN parameter to see whether the user wants the system to make
these decisions.


>    (It wasn't even in the bl**dy release notes!)
>
>I don't have the release notes to look at, but it may have shown up as a bug
>fix.  (Yes, there were SPR's about the previous behavior.)

I don't see why the previous behaviour needed spr's. A TTY line coming from
a modem requires a SET TERM/DIALUP. Why not have the terminal servers provide
for this situation with the set port capability? Have classes of ports which
DO set the DIALUP and some that don't. You're right, you can't make 
everybody happy, but this VERY CERTAINLY is not the way to improve matters.
You just make a different group unhappy. In such a case you should stick
with the status quo and not make the ground constantly move under the
user's feet.

Yours disgruntedly

Brian Williams