[Linux-decnet-user] Feature request

[Stanley F. Q. <sys...@st...>]

Let me explain what I'm doing now, and see if this is possible in 
Linux DECnet.

I have a Linux box (RH 7.2) NFS exporting a chunk of disk to my VMS 
systems.  The VMS systems do daily backups to the Linux box.  Also, I 
have a whole chunk of data on the Linux box that the VMS systems 
"see" as VMS files, characteristics and all.

How this works is that, when I create a file from the VMS system, two 
files get created on the Linux system.  Suppose I create ABC.XYZ;27 
on VMS.  On the Linux box, I get:

 abc.xyz;27          and
 .$ADF$abc.xyz;27		(this is "hidden" because of the leading dot)

(There's also a "abc.xyz" hard-linked to the "abc.xyz;27" to support 
version numbers, but let's not go there.)  By the way -- this is all 
handled by the VMS TCP/IP stack.

Anyway, the .$ADF$ file is 90 bytes long, and holds the VMS 
characteristics of the file.

When I access the file from VMS, it gets reported back as whatever 
characteristics it had when I created it.  If I delete the .$ADF$ 
file, it comes back as Stream-LF.

Not knowing anything about the underlying DECnet protocol, it would 
seem that FAL on the receiving system gets the characteristics on 
files being sent.  And on files being "pulled", it reports the 
characteristics back.

How hard would it be to modify the FAL on Linux to do something like 
this?
--Stan Quayle
Quayle Consulting Inc.

----------
Stanley F. Quayle, P.E. N8SQ  +1 614-868-1363
8572 North Spring Ct., Pickerington, OH  43147  USA
stan-at-stanq-dot-com       http://www.stanq.com