In my last post I mentioned “DecNet Terminal Servers” which connected the dumb terminals to the big Vaxen in the Whippany datacenter. Those terminal servers actually used LAT, which was a Dec proprietary protocol to connect the dumb terminals to the Vaxen. Shortly after I got to Bear Stearns someone in the purchasing department discovered that they could purchase terminal servers which spoke LAT for less than the cost of the Dec terminal servers. These other terminal servers also spoke telnet over TCP/IP, so that the same dumb terminals could be used to connect to the Amdahls and Sun Microsystems servers. Unfortunately those terminal servers needed DNS to resolve the names to IP addresses and there weren’t any DNS servers at Bear Stearns. At the time, the Unix boxes were using NIS, which was then known as Sun’s Yellow Pages (YP).
I was able to get a TCP/IP stack for VMS from a company called TGV (Two Guys and a Vax, not to be confused with the French high speed railroad). In addition to the TCP/IP stack TGV also supplied versions of standard Unix utilities like Bind (the standard DNS server) and Sendmail (the standard SMTP server). Sendmail allowed me to connect the VMS Email system to Sun Unix Email, cc:Mail on the PCs and Profs on the mainframes. Bind let me run a DNS server on one of our spare VaxStations. The issue was creating the zone files (the lists which relate the host names to their IP addresses). There were hundreds of hosts and maintaining the Bind zone files by hand was not feasible. Back in the days before the Internet, people shared information and programs via Usenet over UUCP. As I mentioned in my first post, Email in those days was delivered overnight. I won’t go into details about UUCP and Usenet in this post, but Wikipedia has articles on many of these topics. Usenet newsgroups were also transmitted via UUCP overnight and they allowed people to share information about programs and other issues. When I went looking for a program to convert Unix host files into Bind zone files I discovered that there was a program named h2n which consisted of several thousand lines of AWK code but was very flexible. To get the program I had to send an Email to several FTPmail servers asking for a list of available programs to see which server had h2n. Then I had to send an Email to the proper FTPmail server asking it to send me the program. In those days, programs came as several Email messages which had to be concatenated together to make a shell script which created the file (or files) needed to run the program. All in all it took several days to get the program. Once I had the program I set up a scheduled job to run ypcat to save a copy of the NIS (YP) hosts map to a file, then I ran h2n against that hosts file to create the needed forward (name to IP address) and reverse (IP address to name) zone files. Those files were then copied to a VMS VaxStation (fixt31 sitting under my desk) which was running Bind and that was used by the new terminal servers to map the names to IP addresses. That was the first DNS server at Bear Stearns, and remained the master DNS server for many years.
Enough for today, I hope to get another post out in the next week or two. That one will be a break from my Bear Stearns past. I hope to write about a recent project I was working on.