What do to with an Internet-connected PDP-11?

[John Forecast]

> On Apr 30, 2019, at 9:25 AM, Paul Koning via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
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> 
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>> On Apr 29, 2019, at 9:05 PM, Grant Taylor via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
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>> 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.
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>> But how does a web server run over DECnet?
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>> I guess conceptually you can serve web pages across any protocol that can carry HTTP.
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>> But I guess you could also have a client that ran over DECnet or need a gateway to TCP/IP.
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> 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.
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> 	paul
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> 

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.