Re:Dataforge UUCP
by rocky1138 on Sunday March 24, 2019 @11:17AM
(#19476803)
I'd love to read more about these stories. Do you blog?
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I should, but no. It was a company that sold software to hospitals that would integrate software/servers from different departments via a protocol called HL7. Hospitals were not generally on the internet in the early 90's. So, we would do a week on site installing an AIX box and the software, do a few integrations, etc. Before we left, we'd install a 56k modem.
UUCP was handy because you could push files and run remote commands on a batch schedule without a lot of scripting. We did have some clients that had more complicated setups where we would have to resort to SLIP (serial line IP) and more traditional scripts/rsh/etc. All terribly insecure, with plain text passwords in files...or worse, ".rhosts" files.
Same here UUCP setup to trigger syncing of nightly billing runs on SCO(!) Unixware servers.
All the code was written as a combination of Microfocus COBOL and hairy shell-scripts. I recall we had a lot of random SSH-tunnels being held open via keep-alive-pings, and SLIP was definitely something I had to use.