Banyan VINES resurrection

Banyan VINES was a network operating system developed by Banyan Systems for computers running on top of AT&T's UNIX System V. It was used mainly in large corporate networks, with support for wide-area networking, using static and transient dial-up links. Some networks had hundreds of servers, if not more.

The underlying protocol was VINES IP, a protocol similar to Xerox's XNS. TCP/IP was also supported for client workstations in later versions.

Most servers were under support contracts and the software allowed for a fully-remote-managed network. They used this a lot since the underlying UNIX is restricted from system administrators. Banyan could access it to help you, if you paid them for every hour on a support call. The software was protected with a dongle known as a server key - these were used to ensure that each server had a unique serial number, as the serial number was used to generate each server's VINES IP address.

At the heart of VINES was StreetTalk, a directory service. All StreetTalk objects possessed a three part StreetTalk name, in the format Item@Group@Organisations. There were essentially four different classes of StreetTalk objects - Users, Services, Lists and Nicknames. Lists contained one or more StreetTalk names, and could include other Lists. Nicknames were aliases, and could be in a different group or organisation to the target item.

Each group had a list entitled AdminList@Group@Org which contained the administrators for that group. There was also a special organisation named Servers - each server would have it's own group named ServerName@Servers, with AdminList@Servername@Servers containing the adminstrators of that server.

Early versions of VINES were released only for Banyan's own 680x0 based server platforms, the BNS (Banyan Network Server) and the DTS (Desktop Server). There were later ports for PC hardware, and Banyan also produced an Intel based server named the CNS.

Security

root passwords for a few version leaked:

Version	Password	Notes
8.XX	<unkown>
7.XX	7thHeaven	not sure of case
6.XX	disisdaONE!
5.5X	YamIhere
5.00	Rain4Est
4.11	upyourREV
4.10	StorminNormin	Norman Schwartskorf - Gulf War
4.00	vivelaVINES
3.10	logrhythm	spelled incorrectly on purpose
3.01	nobozos
3.00	pandorasbox
3.00 Beta	makethenumbers
2.10	havingfun
1.31	springfever

Other known passwords:

• Low Level format: goforit
• Previous Low Level format: format

SDK

Banyan had an SDK for developing server and PC based applications. VINES 6.00 introduced the ability to write device drivers, and also switched to using GCC. Currently no versions of the SDK have been recovered.

What's new per version

The early history of VINES is lost, with very little surviving. Here's a brief, but incomplete, history of changes.

VINES 4.00 introduced major changes to StreetTalk - changes to the way it updated meant that the the special group Servers@Servers was no longer required. 4.00 was also the last version to be released for 680x0 and 286 based servers.

VINES 4.10 added support for Windows 3.0 and OS/2 1.x clients.

VINES 4.11 was a new cut of 4.10 to add support for additional server based hardware.

VINES 5.00 added support for Apple Macs and file access rights on a per file basis. This was a fork of 4.10 so didn't support the new server hardware of 4.11.

VINES 5.50 added 4.11's hardware support to the other features of 5.00.

VINES 5.52, 5.53 and 5.54 added additional server hardware support.

VINES 6.00 added loadable device drivers and root access.

VINES 6.20, 6.30 and 6.40 were maintenance releases of 6.00.

VINES 7.00 added support for larger filesystems (previously they were limited to 2GB), long filename support, and StreetTalk shadowing. The root filesystem was also enlarged.

VINES 7.10 was a maintenance release for 7.00.

VINES 8.00 added very little other than support for MPS 1.4. SMP had been supported since at least VINES 4.00 on certified hardware, but needed special media.

VINES 8.50 was the Y2K compliant version of 8.00.

VINES 8.60 was the final release of VINES, containing all of the maintenance patches issued for VINES 8.60.

There was also a product named ENS for Netware that allowed Netware servers to use StreetTalk. Initially these used their own special ENS servers, which were cut down VINES servers. ENS 1.00 was effectively VINES 5.20, and ENS 1.1 was VINES 5.30. Later ENS could use a standard VINES Server instead.

There were also versions of VINES released for some versions of commercial UNIX - SCO Unix, Solaris, HP-UX and AIX. Some of these were issued under ENS branding.

Finally there was a port of VINES for Windows NT entitled StreetTalk for NT.