If the thought of typing in a password in full view each time you copy a file makes you break into a cold sweat, never fear. OpenVMS has a feature called DECnet proxies which can help. (Note: Some OpenVMS administrators regard DECnet proxies as an even greater security hole, so they may not be enabled at your site.)
At the OpenVMS machine, the administrator can set up a correlation between users on remote and local machines. A common way to do this is to say that if (for example) I am logged in as user “patrick” on one machine, then I can be trusted as user “PATRICK” on another in a manner similar to the Linux /etc/hosts.equiv or .rhosts files. So, if I issue a command like:
dncopy myfile.txt tramp::when logged in as “patrick”, then the file will be copied to my home directory on OpenVMS. Proxies are often more subtle than this because it is possible to map remote users on different machines to different accounts on the OpenVMS machine. See your system administrator to find out what (if any) proxy setup is available at your site. Alternatively, you can type in dndir vmsnode::; in this case, you will be shown the directory where your files will end up, or given an error if unqualified access is disabled. (OpenVMS security can be very tight, depending on site policies; this command may even trigger an alarm.)
