INFO-VAX Thu, 07 Jun 2007 Volume 2007 : Issue 309 Contents: Re: CDC software (formerly known as Ross Systems) to drop Gembase VMS support su FYI - Limit to the ACP Caches Impact of an abnormally high RECNXINTERVAL Re: Impact of an abnormally high RECNXINTERVAL Re: Not on latest Roadmap: OpenVMS VAX Version 8.x "under investigation" Re: Not on latest Roadmap: OpenVMS VAX Version 8.x "under investigation" Re: PCSI, disk space, UNDO, unseen dangers etc porting ignorance (was Re: Story Time) Re: Question about Mozilla crash (Flash) Re: Questions about changing backup devices/methods Re: Questions about changing backup devices/methods Re: Questions about changing backup devices/methods Re: Questions about changing backup devices/methods Re: Questions about changing backup devices/methods Re: Questions about changing backup devices/methods Re: Remote Shadow... Re: SECURITY.AUDIT$JOURNAL and ERRLOG.SYS Re: SECURITY.AUDIT$JOURNAL and ERRLOG.SYS Re: SECURITY.AUDIT$JOURNAL and ERRLOG.SYS Re: SSH login with expired password Re: SSH login with expired password Re: Story Time Re: Story Time Re: Story Time Re: Story Time Re: Story Time Re: Story Time Re: Story Time Re: Story Time Re: Story Time Re: Story Time Re: Story Time Re: Thin wire Coax Ethernet on Alpha Re: VMS Update Monday June 4th Re: VMS Update Monday June 4th Re: VMS Update Monday June 4th Re: VMS Update Monday June 4th Re: VMS Update Monday June 4th Re: VMS Update Monday June 4th Re: VMS Update Monday June 4th Re: [OT] 6-JUN-1944 Re: [OT] 6-JUN-1944 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 06 Jun 2007 19:36:47 -0500 From: David J Dachtera Subject: Re: CDC software (formerly known as Ross Systems) to drop Gembase VMS support su Message-ID: <4667531F.19BCE114@spam.comcast.net> dan.klein@hp.com wrote: > > On Jun 4, 2:02 pm, "Syltrem" wrote: > > "IanMiller" wrote in message > > > > news:1180795543.509584.301750@g4g2000hsf.googlegroups.com... > > > > > What did CDC say when you contacted them about this? > > > > Nothing much so far, but I met our account representative last Friday and > > told him we need VMS to be able to continue interfacing with other > > applications we have. So if he wants us to buy stuff from them that's what > > we need. > > He said he would check what the official statement is about VMS at CDC. > > He was certain VMS was dead at the vendor level (HP) so why would they > > support it? I explained that Alpha is dead but VMS is not... Same old story, > > VMS is dead for everyone. Couldn't HP advertise it in some good IT papers, > > to let people know it's alive still ? > > Would that hurt them so much to spend a few thousad bucks for this ? > > > > Syltrem > > Greetings, > > Allow me to correct a gross inaccuracy. HP HAS NO INTENTION OF ENDING > OPENVMS FOR THE FORSEABLE FUTURE. PERIOD. > > http://h71000.www7.hp.com/news/annmcquaid.html > www.hp.com/go/openvms > > Any one on this usent, within HP, or outside of HP who believes or > makes such a statement is simply wrong or attempting to proliferate a > lie. > > While nothing lasts for ever and some day even the world will come to > an end the fact is that ending OpenVMS is not in anyones plans at HP. Wonderful news! SO - when does the new ad campaign run in The Wall Street Journal? ...New York Times? ...Chicago Tribune? ...Crain's Chicago Business? LA Times? ...major radio and TV outlets? When does the HP/OpenVMS Executive tour begin to bring the Healthcare and Financial ISVs back on board? See, this is an all-or-nothing proposition. It either goes all the way or it doesn't go at all. Doing nothing confirms the "dead" claims. (Actions (or the lack thereof) speak louder than words, remember?) Just "doing something" makes us look like, "Okay, we'll give the appeareances of taking action, but its just to shut the nay-sayers up - we don't really mean it". -- David J Dachtera dba DJE Systems http://www.djesys.com/ Unofficial OpenVMS Marketing Home Page http://www.djesys.com/vms/market/ Unofficial Affordable OpenVMS Home Page: http://www.djesys.com/vms/soho/ Unofficial OpenVMS-IA32 Home Page: http://www.djesys.com/vms/ia32/ Unofficial OpenVMS Hobbyist Support Page: http://www.djesys.com/vms/support/ ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 06 Jun 2007 19:26:20 -0700 From: daryljones@att.net Subject: FYI - Limit to the ACP Caches Message-ID: <1181183180.199254.27830@n15g2000prd.googlegroups.com> Hello Everyone: This is FYI. Thanks for your recent call about the inability of Sysgen to detect and report erroneous values for ACP_HRDCACHE in OpenVMS Alpha V8.3 The problem is actually worse than you pointed out. The internal parameter is stored in a 16-bit word. Any value larger than 65535 decimal will get stored as a sign-extended longword - but only the low- order word is kept... Attempting to set the parameter to 68000 results in a value of 2464. (68000 is hex 000109A0, 2464 is hex 000009A0) Autogen is the supported method for adjusting parameters. If Autogen had worked correctly, this would have been your answer. However, I also tried setting the parameter using Autogen, and there's nothing to indicate a problem. The same bad value is set in the resulting system parameter file. ACP_HDRCACHE parameter information: Feedback information. Old value was 232, New value is 68000 Hit percentage: 89% Attempt rate: 1 attempts per 10 sec. - AUTOGEN parameter calculation has been overridden. The calculated value was 232. The value 68000 will be used in accordance with the following requirements: ACP_HDRCACHE has been specified by a hard-coded value of 68000. I am taking your case and opening an elevation to VMS Engineering. I expect that they'll add a release note to a future version that cautions system managers about this issue. In the meantime, this case will get auto-closed. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 06 Jun 2007 16:55:30 -0400 From: JF Mezei Subject: Impact of an abnormally high RECNXINTERVAL Message-ID: <4f0e4$46671f75$cef8887a$20848@TEKSAVVY.COM> Lets say I were to make RECNXINTERVAL 1 hour. (3600 seconds). The SYSGEN help says that it is the polling interval to attempt reconnection to remote systems. I had thought it was about how soon to declare a system "dead" and remove it from the cluster. Does this mean that if I temporarily pull the ethernet cable from a machine and plug it back in 20 seconds later, it will take one hour for that machine to re-integrate in the cluster ? What happens when , with recnxinterval of 1 hour, I pull the ethernet cable out. Would all nodes continue to purr happily for one hour (instead of freezing due to loss of quorum) ? In such a case, I assume individual processes would go into LEF the second they do an IO on a remote disk ? Would all lock activity be queued to be sent out once the ethernet resumes ? Would that queue grow indefinitely ? Does this mean that during recnxinterval, node1 can make a lock on "X", and node2 can also make a lock on "X" since node2 will not have received the node1 message about "X" being locked ? Would disks go into mount verification, or would they remain mounted and wait for RECNXINTERVAL before going into mount verify ? (this would be for an ethernet only cluster) ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 7 Jun 2007 02:57:49 +0000 (UTC) From: moroney@world.std.spaamtrap.com (Michael Moroney) Subject: Re: Impact of an abnormally high RECNXINTERVAL Message-ID: JF Mezei writes: >Lets say I were to make RECNXINTERVAL 1 hour. (3600 seconds). >The SYSGEN help says that it is the polling interval to attempt >reconnection to remote systems. I had thought it was about how soon to >declare a system "dead" and remove it from the cluster. They're both right. Upon loss of a link, the system will try RECNXINTERVAL seconds to reestablish a connection, and declare it dead thereafter. >Does this mean that if I temporarily pull the ethernet cable from a >machine and plug it back in 20 seconds later, it will take one hour for >that machine to re-integrate in the cluster ? No, it means you can pull the cable for up to an hour without a system being removed from the cluster. >What happens when , with recnxinterval of 1 hour, I pull the ethernet >cable out. Would all nodes continue to purr happily for one hour >(instead of freezing due to loss of quorum) ? In such a case, I assume >individual processes would go into LEF the second they do an IO on a >remote disk ? Your cluster would likely "freeze" very quickly because of all the lock requests not being granted (because of being in an incompatible mode on the disconnected system, or the system mastering the particular lock) >Does this mean that during recnxinterval, node1 can make a lock on "X", >and node2 can also make a lock on "X" since node2 will not have received >the node1 message about "X" being locked ? That would kind of defeat the whole purpose of locks, wouldn't it? >Would disks go into mount verification, or would they remain mounted and >wait for RECNXINTERVAL before going into mount verify ? They (remote disks) will go into mount verify, unless disk activity didn't take place because of all the locks not being granted. You can try it if you want. RECNXINTERVAL is dynamic so you don't have to reboot. Set it on _all_ nodes, because if one has it set low, it'll declare the connection dead and start reconfiguring the cluster. I'll tell you what you'll see. The cluster will quickly "hang" and remain hung until you either reconnect the cable or RECNXINTERVAL times out. It'll look like a quorum hang, but it's not. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 06 Jun 2007 14:14:24 -0600 From: Keith Parris Subject: Re: Not on latest Roadmap: OpenVMS VAX Version 8.x "under investigation" Message-ID: Ron Johnson wrote: {an excellent and informative description of why he prefers Linux to *BSD, followed by:} > just the other day at work, THREE Alphas (2 clustered and > one stand-alone, all running v8.2) crashed during a network hiccup > while one of the clustered boxes and the stand-alone box were > writing to an NFS drive. The third box (the other cluster member) > crashed *hard* when it lost cluster connectivity. To allow cluster members to ride through a temporary LAN outage (where the LAN is used as the cluster interconnect), folks normally raise the SYSGEN parameter RECNXINTERVAL to a value just over the maximum number of seconds in duration of an outage they need the cluster to ride through. I wouldn't expect a standalone VMS node to crash on a LAN outage. Did you get crash dumps? And I wouldn't expect a cluster member to crash when it _lost_ cluster connectivity -- it should suspend its operations due to quorum loss until connectivity is restored, and then it might crash if it found it had been removed from the cluster by the other members in the intervening time. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 06 Jun 2007 15:41:19 -0500 From: Ron Johnson Subject: Re: Not on latest Roadmap: OpenVMS VAX Version 8.x "under investigation" Message-ID: On 06/06/07 15:14, Keith Parris wrote: > Ron Johnson wrote: > {an excellent and informative description of why he prefers Linux to > *BSD, followed by:} >> just the other day at work, THREE Alphas (2 clustered and >> one stand-alone, all running v8.2) crashed during a network hiccup >> while one of the clustered boxes and the stand-alone box were >> writing to an NFS drive. The third box (the other cluster member) >> crashed *hard* when it lost cluster connectivity. > > To allow cluster members to ride through a temporary LAN outage (where > the LAN is used as the cluster interconnect), folks normally raise the > SYSGEN parameter RECNXINTERVAL to a value just over the maximum number > of seconds in duration of an outage they need the cluster to ride through. > > I wouldn't expect a standalone VMS node to crash on a LAN outage. Did > you get crash dumps? On one of the nodes, but not the other. Our SysAdmin sent it off to HP. > And I wouldn't expect a cluster member to crash > when it _lost_ cluster connectivity Neither would I. :( > -- it should suspend its operations > due to quorum loss until connectivity is restored, and then it might > crash if it found it had been removed from the cluster by the other > members in the intervening time. -- Ron Johnson, Jr. Jefferson LA USA Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day. Hit him with a fish, and he goes away for good! ------------------------------ Date: 6 Jun 2007 12:59:40 -0500 From: koehler@eisner.nospam.encompasserve.org (Bob Koehler) Subject: Re: PCSI, disk space, UNDO, unseen dangers etc Message-ID: In article , glen herrmannsfeldt writes: > Richard B. Gilbert wrote: > > (snip) > >>>> VMS 1.0 let you rename a directory into itself. > >>> Before VMS 3.0 you could delete a non-empty directory by just setting >>> it's protection. But I've never seen any directory refered to _only_ >>> by itself other than 000000.DIR;1 > >> How would you expect to find it? I suppose you could search INDEXF.SYS. > > As far as I know, you can't. The disk blocks disappear, but the > quota doesn't change. The first time I did it accidentally. > > If someone gets 1.0 running under a hobbyist license we can test it. I would expect VFY2 would find it, and move it to [1,3] . ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 06 Jun 2007 22:48:11 -0500 From: "Craig A. Berry" Subject: porting ignorance (was Re: Story Time) Message-ID: In article <5cl99aF307t9eU1@mid.individual.net>, bill@cs.uofs.edu (Bill Gunshannon) wrote: > Someone else hinted that porting > Unix/Linux Open Source Software was somehow trivial and could be > done by the people here in their spare time. To whomever isn't doing something non-trivial in his or her spare time, I pity you. And anyone who thinks that all porting work that is of value is non-trivial (or is done entirely by volunteers in their spare time) is not well-informed about either porting or about open source software. > I merely pointed out > that porting from Unix/Linux to VMS is anything but trivial unless > the program itself is trivial (and therefore of little if any value.) The difficulty of porting software is not directly related to its value. I've seen some very slick Java apps that just took half a dozen lines of DCL as a wrapper around the Java command to get them working just fine on VMS. I've seen quite a number of highly useful C programs that I just compiled and ran on VMS with no modifications, programs that did things like converting text to PDF, or a linguistics program that parses English text and identifies parts of speech based on statistics and a dictionary. Then there are things like Apache and Mozilla that took a very substantial effort from OVMS Engineering. And everything in between. Categorizing the work involved in porting as either trivial or non-trivial disrespects the people and companies who actually do that work. It is work, and it does require some level of commitment from the people and/or companies who stand to benefit from the result. While it would be nice to see a greater commitment from HP, the absence of it is -- for those willing to actually do something -- merely one factor among many in deciding what can get done. > Funny, I have fork() on the XP box on my desk (at least under Cygwin, > I haven't done any native Windows development in a long time so I can't > say if they have it now, too.) They don't. Many of the same problems arise when porting Unix software to Win32 as arise when porting it to VMS, fork being one common thorn in the side, along with inter-process communication, file locking, the fact that select() only works on socket file handles, etc. In some cases, VMS has better and more complete POSIX implementations and is easier to port to than is Win32. In some cases, the particular features and assumptions of Win32 cause fewer headaches. In both cases, porting the build environment is usually the most time consuming part of the port. > > There are many ways to accomplish a given task. In some cases, there are > > better ways of doing the same thing. > > OK, so how would you accomplish the equivalent of fork() in all this > OSS people think we should be porting to VMS? If you know a "better > way" stop keeping it under your hat. These matters are well known and frequently discussed by people who actually work with open source software instead of talking about how difficult it is to port to VMS. While there is no direct equivalent to fork(), there are various different ways to do multiple threads of execution and inter-process communication. As you have pointed out elsewhere in this thread, there is no particularly good reason a utility like GNU tar would use fork(), but it (and many other packages) do so whether they really need it or not. It happens to be a popular idiom and works well enough on Unix; if you'd been willing to spend 10 minutes looking at the tar sources, you'd see that they use fork() for, among other things, handling compression in a child process while another process manages the main archiving purpose of the program. If portability and performance were a concern, POSIX threads might be an alternative. On VMS, ASTs and/or multiple processes could undoubtedly accomplish the same task. I haven't followed this whole thread (I'm too busy porting open source software to read everything here), but it certainly appears that the main thing thing being ported and re-ported here is ignorance. -- Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 06 Jun 2007 17:17:55 -0600 From: Mark Berryman Subject: Re: Question about Mozilla crash (Flash) Message-ID: <4666de34@mvb.saic.com> JF Mezei wrote: > The http://www.theinquirer.net often causes Mozilla to crash. This also > happened with Netscape 4.8 on an old mac. > > I have the output below. > > Can anyone confirm that it crashes while trying to process a JPEG image > inside a flash module ? > > (I ask this so I can complain to the inquirer webmaster and provide as > many details as possible). > >> Improper call to JPEG library in state 202 >> Unable to read JPEG data >> %SYSTEM-F-ACCVIO, access violation, reason mask=00, virtual >> address=000000000000 >> 0000, PC=0000000008540FD4, PS=0000001B >> %TRACE-F-TRACEBACK, symbolic stack dump follows >> image module routine line rel PC >> abs PC >> libflash4plugin DISPLAYLIST bbox 11152 0000000000000284 >> 0000000008540FD4 >> %SYSTEM-F-ACCVIO, access violation, reason mask=00, virtual >> address=000000010000 >> 0000, PC=0000000100000000, PS=0000001B >> >> Improperly handled condition, image exit forced. >> Signal arguments: Number = 0000000000000005 >> Name = 000000000000000C >> 0000000000010000 >> 0000000100000000 >> 0000000100000000 >> 000000000000001B >> >> Register dump: >> R0 = 0000000000000001 R1 = 0000000000000001 R2 = >> 000000007BF68590 >> R3 = 000000007AE34500 R4 = 000000007AE344F0 R5 = >> 000000007AE344D8 >> R6 = 000000007AE34570 R7 = FFFFFFFF8194DF20 R8 = >> 000000000E3DBE58 >> R9 = 0000000000000001 R10 = 0000000000008000 R11 = >> FFFFFFFFFFFF8000 >> R12 = 000000000852A310 R13 = FFFFFFFF8194E3F0 R14 = >> 0000000000000000 >> R15 = 0000000000000000 R16 = 0000000000000EE0 R17 = >> FFFFFFFF77773700 >> R18 = 002B6D980939E780 R19 = 000000007AE34240 R20 = >> 00000000000052EA >> R21 = 000000007B66A848 R22 = 002B6D980BB7BF68 R23 = >> 000000007AE34230 >> R24 = 000000000850A000 R25 = 0000000000000001 R26 = >> 0000000100000001 >> R27 = 000000007B62D590 R28 = 000000007BF7C660 R29 = >> 000000007AE34200 >> SP = 000000007AE34200 PC = 0000000100000000 PS = >> 000000000000001B >> Mozilla stopped at 3-JUN-2007 23:10:39.84 Do not run the Flash plugin. The code far too out of date to be of any use and the code makes assumptions that are no longer valid in the current Flash world. Mark Berryman ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 06 Jun 2007 17:53:03 GMT From: Tad Winters Subject: Re: Questions about changing backup devices/methods Message-ID: Ron Johnson wrote in news:H_B9i.116397$NK5.115984@newsfe23.lga: > On 06/06/07 10:44, Tad Winters wrote: >> I have been asked about changing the way some VMS systems are backed >> up. Currently, each system has a directly attached SCSI >> (single-ended) tape drive. Each system runs a command procedure on a >> daily basis, which uses the native VMS backup program to create image >> backups of all the data disks, each in separate save sets. The >> systems in question are: AlphaServer ES40 with OpenVMS V7.3 (data >> center 1) AlphaServer 1200 with OpenVMS V7.1-1H1 (data center 1) >> AlphaServer 1000A with OpenVMS V6.2-1H3 (data center 2) >> AlphaServer 1000 with OpenVMS V6.2 (data center 2) >> >> The personnel who handle the backup tapes are interested in a more >> hands- off approach. They wish to use an autoloader or a tape >> library. The current systems do not include any additional software >> to manage tape storage. (Also, the only system with a fiber card is >> the ES40, and it's not currently being used.) >> >> Since I've never had any experience with autoloaders or tape >> libraries, > > Autoloaders are simple. > > Tape libraries like the 10-slot 2-drive TL892 (which can handle TZ89 > drives) should run with v6.2 with no problems. > > How would the tape drives "see" the remote devices? DECnet over IP? I guess I should have mentioned that all the systems are running MultiNet. Those in data center 1 are on V4.4 and those in data center 2 are on V4.0. The 2 systems in data center 1 are *not* running DECnet. I now recall that MultiNet has a remote allocation protocol, but it seems that this could be problematic, since evidently an autoloader is seen as a single device and just automatically moves from one tape to the next. This would mean that one system would have to complete its backup job before the next system could start. How is a tape library presented to the system? Is additional software required, or does VMS contain all that's needed to work with them already? > >> >> I'd >> like to know what it would take to make these work with these >> systems. Specifically: >> >> Will any of these systems require an OS upgrade? If so, which ones? >> >> What additional software is required? (The proposed library is an HP >> MSL6030 and the proposed autoloader is a Quantum SuperLoader 3.) >> >> Can multiple systems take advantage of one of these devices? If so, >> can it be done over TCP/IP? > > TMSCP over TCP/IP and fast ethernet will work. The remote data center is likely connected over frame-relay, probably with a T1, but maybe with a T3. > > How much data do you have to back up? The ES40 has about 310 GB. The 1200 has about 70 GB. The 1000A has about 10 GB. The 1000 has about 12 GB. So, just over 400 GB total. > >> If there is a solution here, what does this mean for a system disk >> failure? Is it possible to boot from a VMS CD and create (and >> restore) an image backup of the system disk? >> >> Would direct attached tape drives still be required or desirable? > > It never hurts to have a table-mounted drive at each DC that you can > plug into either machine. > ------------------------------ Date: 6 Jun 2007 13:24:04 -0500 From: koehler@eisner.nospam.encompasserve.org (Bob Koehler) Subject: Re: Questions about changing backup devices/methods Message-ID: In article , Tad Winters writes: > > Since I've never had any experience with autoloaders or tape libraries, I'd > like to know what it would take to make these work with these systems. > Specifically: > > Will any of these systems require an OS upgrade? If so, which ones? Autoloaders for Alpha have been available since beta release days. You should be able to find an autoloader for all the systems you have. > What additional software is required? (The proposed library is an HP > MSL6030 and the proposed autoloader is a Quantum SuperLoader 3.) Ah, now that specific set you could check againsgt the SPD. > Can multiple systems take advantage of one of these devices? If so, can it > be done over TCP/IP? This will probably depend on which IP stack you're using and what the software you get can support. Are these systems not clustered? > If there is a solution here, what does this mean for a system disk failure? > Is it possible to boot from a VMS CD and create (and restore) an image > backup of the system disk? Yes, you can do an image creation and/or restore while booted from the CD, but only from locally (or perhaps Infoserver) attached tape drives. (VMS now includes Infoserver's server protocols so that might be on be of your Alphas, check the SPD to see if those services are included in the versions you have.) Most likely you will not be able to get to an IP based service from the install CD. > Would direct attached tape drives still be required or desirable? See above. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 06 Jun 2007 11:53:57 -0700 From: BaxterD@tessco.com Subject: Re: Questions about changing backup devices/methods Message-ID: <1181156037.622295.84190@x35g2000prf.googlegroups.com> On Jun 6, 11:44 am, Tad Winters wrote: > I have been asked about changing the way some VMS systems are backed up. > Currently, each system has a directly attached SCSI (single-ended) tape > drive. Each system runs a command procedure on a daily basis, which uses > the native VMS backup program to create image backups of all the data > disks, each in separate save sets. The systems in question are: > AlphaServer ES40 with OpenVMS V7.3 (data center 1) > AlphaServer 1200 with OpenVMS V7.1-1H1 (data center 1) > AlphaServer 1000A with OpenVMS V6.2-1H3 (data center 2) > AlphaServer 1000 with OpenVMS V6.2 (data center 2) > > The personnel who handle the backup tapes are interested in a more hands- > off approach. They wish to use an autoloader or a tape library. The > current systems do not include any additional software to manage tape > storage. (Also, the only system with a fiber card is the ES40, and it's > not currently being used.) > > Since I've never had any experience with autoloaders or tape libraries, I'd > like to know what it would take to make these work with these systems. > Specifically: > > Will any of these systems require an OS upgrade? If so, which ones? > > What additional software is required? (The proposed library is an HP > MSL6030 and the proposed autoloader is a Quantum SuperLoader 3.) > > Can multiple systems take advantage of one of these devices? If so, can it > be done over TCP/IP? > > If there is a solution here, what does this mean for a system disk failure? > Is it possible to boot from a VMS CD and create (and restore) an image > backup of the system disk? > > Would direct attached tape drives still be required or desirable? > > Thanks for your responses! > > Tad On one (or all) of your VMS systems try typing $ help robot I think that the "Media Robot Utility" (MRU) comes with the OS, if not someone on this group will know where you can get it (it is free). I am not sure how widely it is applicable, however I know it works with the Compaq MSL5000 series Libraries. Dave. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 06 Jun 2007 20:02:03 -0500 From: David J Dachtera Subject: Re: Questions about changing backup devices/methods Message-ID: <4667590B.43EA3E0E@spam.comcast.net> Tad Winters wrote: > > I have been asked about changing the way some VMS systems are backed up. > Currently, each system has a directly attached SCSI (single-ended) tape > drive. Each system runs a command procedure on a daily basis, which uses > the native VMS backup program to create image backups of all the data > disks, each in separate save sets. The systems in question are: > AlphaServer ES40 with OpenVMS V7.3 (data center 1) > AlphaServer 1200 with OpenVMS V7.1-1H1 (data center 1) > AlphaServer 1000A with OpenVMS V6.2-1H3 (data center 2) > AlphaServer 1000 with OpenVMS V6.2 (data center 2) > > The personnel who handle the backup tapes are interested in a more hands- > off approach. If you're sending tapes off-site for safe storage, that could be a challenge. > They wish to use an autoloader or a tape library. The > current systems do not include any additional software to manage tape > storage. (Also, the only system with a fiber card is the ES40, and it's > not currently being used.) > > Since I've never had any experience with autoloaders or tape libraries, I'd > like to know what it would take to make these work with these systems. > Specifically: > > Will any of these systems require an OS upgrade? If so, which ones? The V6.2* systems will have issues with fibre channel, as will the AS 1%%% systems. > What additional software is required? (The proposed library is an HP > MSL6030 and the proposed autoloader is a Quantum SuperLoader 3.) Other posters have cited the ROBOT (MRU) software. > Can multiple systems take advantage of one of these devices? If so, can it > be done over TCP/IP? Multinet supports it, within limits. > If there is a solution here, what does this mean for a system disk failure? It means for VMS the same as it means for non-VMS: If you need something beyond the boot CD to do the restore, you'll have to "restore the system before you can restore the system". > Is it possible to boot from a VMS CD and create (and restore) an image > backup of the system disk? Yes, provided nothing beyond the boot CD operating environment is required. Otherwise, Y.O.Y.O. (You're On Your Own) > Would direct attached tape drives still be required or desirable? If you're not planning on revamping your environment with newer VMS versions, you might do better to stay with the DAS tape drives. If you can find TZ8x7 mini-libraries, these have good track records, but are very dated. They do, however, work with MRU. The robot is found at the same SCSI port and target as the drive; however, the drive is LUN zero(0) and the robot will be LUN one(1). If direct SCSI attached, you'll have to put steps into the system startup to create a GKun01: device for the robot. For HSJ and HSZ, see the CLI Reference Manual for setting up pass-thru devices to access the robot. > Thanks for your responses! Hope this helps! -- David J Dachtera dba DJE Systems http://www.djesys.com/ Unofficial OpenVMS Marketing Home Page http://www.djesys.com/vms/market/ Unofficial Affordable OpenVMS Home Page: http://www.djesys.com/vms/soho/ Unofficial OpenVMS-IA32 Home Page: http://www.djesys.com/vms/ia32/ Unofficial OpenVMS Hobbyist Support Page: http://www.djesys.com/vms/support/ ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 07 Jun 2007 01:06:45 GMT From: Tad Winters Subject: Re: Questions about changing backup devices/methods Message-ID: BaxterD@tessco.com wrote in news:1181156037.622295.84190@x35g2000prf.googlegroups.com: > On Jun 6, 11:44 am, Tad Winters > wrote: >> I have been asked about changing the way some VMS systems are backed >> up. Currently, each system has a directly attached SCSI >> (single-ended) tape drive. Each system runs a command procedure on a >> daily basis, which uses the native VMS backup program to create image >> backups of all the data disks, each in separate save sets. The >> systems in question are: AlphaServer ES40 with OpenVMS V7.3 (data >> center 1) AlphaServer 1200 with OpenVMS V7.1-1H1 (data center 1) >> AlphaServer 1000A with OpenVMS V6.2-1H3 (data center 2) >> AlphaServer 1000 with OpenVMS V6.2 (data center 2) >> >> The personnel who handle the backup tapes are interested in a more >> hands- off approach. They wish to use an autoloader or a tape >> library. The current systems do not include any additional software >> to manage tape storage. (Also, the only system with a fiber card is >> the ES40, and it's not currently being used.) >> >> Since I've never had any experience with autoloaders or tape >> libraries, I'd like to know what it would take to make these work >> with these systems. Specifically: >> >> Will any of these systems require an OS upgrade? If so, which ones? >> >> What additional software is required? (The proposed library is an HP >> MSL6030 and the proposed autoloader is a Quantum SuperLoader 3.) >> >> Can multiple systems take advantage of one of these devices? If so, >> can it be done over TCP/IP? >> >> If there is a solution here, what does this mean for a system disk >> failure? Is it possible to boot from a VMS CD and create (and >> restore) an image backup of the system disk? >> >> Would direct attached tape drives still be required or desirable? >> >> Thanks for your responses! >> >> Tad > > On one (or all) of your VMS systems try typing > > $ help robot > > I think that the "Media Robot Utility" (MRU) comes with the OS, if not > someone on this group will know where you can get it (it is free). > I am not sure how widely it is applicable, however I know it works > with the Compaq MSL5000 series Libraries. > > Dave. > It's definitely not on any of the systems, since I built them all, well, all but the AlphaServer 1000. A quick search and I found the SPD. It says it requires OpenVMS V7.3-2. I list that as a first step. I think that's reasonable, since that's probably a minimum requirement to support any new kind of hardware. Will a KZPBA be used for connecting an MSL6030? ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 06 Jun 2007 21:41:51 -0400 From: "Richard B. Gilbert" Subject: Re: Questions about changing backup devices/methods Message-ID: <4667625F.3030804@comcast.net> David J Dachtera wrote: > Tad Winters wrote: > >>I have been asked about changing the way some VMS systems are backed up. >>Currently, each system has a directly attached SCSI (single-ended) tape >>drive. Each system runs a command procedure on a daily basis, which uses >>the native VMS backup program to create image backups of all the data >>disks, each in separate save sets. The systems in question are: >>AlphaServer ES40 with OpenVMS V7.3 (data center 1) >>AlphaServer 1200 with OpenVMS V7.1-1H1 (data center 1) >>AlphaServer 1000A with OpenVMS V6.2-1H3 (data center 2) >>AlphaServer 1000 with OpenVMS V6.2 (data center 2) >> >>The personnel who handle the backup tapes are interested in a more hands- >>off approach. > > > If you're sending tapes off-site for safe storage, that could be a challenge. > The OP's site may be different from the ones I'm familiar with but getting tapes off site is not quite as big a problem as getting tapes mounted at 2:00 AM! The system manager can come in at 8:30 AM and unload the tapes, pack them in the box, fill out the manifest, etc. IF you have operators on duty 24x7 it's easy. If you don't want to hire a third shift or pay overtime, life is more difficult. I had to cope with: A. Backup the system disk and four or five others that did NOT involve the Oracle database. Start at 5:30 PM finish 2-3 hours later. B. Backup the Oracle Archived Redo Logs. About thirty minutes. C. Oracle Hot backup disk to disk. About three-four hours. D. Copy the Hot backup to tape. About three hours. The drives were TZ88 or TZ87, desktop. No stacker, no tape library. The Hot Backup disks stay on site in case we need to do a restore. The tapes go offsite in case we need to recover from a disaster. And this was a relatively small site: 2 ES40's, 2 4100s, Alphaserver 2100, Alphaserver 2000. The ES40's and the Alphaserver 2000 were production, the others were test and development. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 06 Jun 2007 16:51:51 -0600 From: Keith Parris Subject: Re: Remote Shadow... Message-ID: Hal Kuff wrote: > Thats remote shadow the non-HP product... > http://www.advsyscon.com/products/rso/ > "Hal Kuff" wrote in message > news:XEk7i.16603$7T.2371@newsfe18.lga... > >>Any current users using this product at 40 to 50ms latency? You'd probably have to ask ASCI for a customer reference. I haven't worked with that product. The first thing I'd advise enyone who is considering multi-site data replication to do is to determine the values of two metrics: Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO), as they apply to their particular business. RPO quantifies how much data loss, if any, is acceptable in conjunction with a disaster before excessive harm to the business occurs, and RTO similarly quantifies downtime, if any is acceptable. Once you know those two metrics, you can choose a technical solution to meet them. More details are in the presentations at http://www2.openvms.org/kparris/ If your RPO were zero (no data loss acceptable), then asynchronou replication of any sort would be unacceptable, since it implies queuing of data (transactions) at the source site and that queue of data would be lost if the source site were destroyed. How much data loss is acceptable determines by how much the copy of data at Reno can lag behind the data Baltimore, if any. > The problem we are poking at is a site in Baltimore Maryland and a > site in Reno Nevada... circuit is a DS-3 or an OC-3 ... the latency is > 50ms so you can not use any conventional system to shadow or > mirror.... The latency present requires you do some sort of asynch > mirroring.... Don't automatically rule out synchronous mirroring as an option. HBVS has been successfully tested out to a distance of more than 60,000 miles; it just slows down as the latency increases due to the speed of light over the inter-site distance. We know of at least one customer shadowing over a distance of 3,000 miles. If you were to use HBVS directly, then the relevant question would be whether or not the application performance is sensitive to disk latency, such that performance would become unacceptable with a remote shadowset member present. I talked with one customer recently who plans to shadow across a distance of 1,000 miles, having determined exactly how many disk writes a transaction takes, how much latency that distance would add to each transaction, and that they had so much headroom compared with maximum acceptable response times that the additional latency was perfectly acceptable. Regardless of the solution chosen, I would advise a test of your actual application within your existing datacenter with the distance between "sites" (and the proposed link bandwidth) simulated by a network emulator box like a Shunra STORM or an Adtech Spirent box. You might consider a mix of replication techniques. I've seen many customers recently adopt a "multi-hop" approach to replication, using HBVS to replicate to a (relatively) nearby site for disaster tolerance with zero RPO, and then using asynchronous replication for to a site 1,000, 1,500, or 2,000 miles away for purposes of disaster recovery (in the event both local sites are destroyed). If your RTO is large enough, you could consider copying files (or backing up disks, or using HBVS to shadow offline copies of disks, where shadowset members might be brought back into the main shadowsets periodically with Mini-Copies) over the network instead of continuous replication. For the Baltimore sites within a 3-mile circle, dark fiber is likely to be readily available. If you have line-of-sight, then in addition to microwave, I'd also look at other types of RF wireless links and I'd also look at Free Space Optics technology as a potential low-cost link option. 100 megabits between nearby buildings with FSO can cost as little as $5K. See http://www.freespaceoptic.com/ and the articles at http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/05/30/22TCbridges_1.html and http://www.nwc.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=170701102 > We actually have several EVA8000 arrays and one XP10000 array So I'm sure you've also thought of Continuous Access asynchronous replication as an option. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 06 Jun 2007 11:43:03 -0700 From: Ken Fairfield Subject: Re: SECURITY.AUDIT$JOURNAL and ERRLOG.SYS Message-ID: <5codduF327b3pU1@mid.individual.net> Phillip Helbig---remove CLOTHES to reply wrote: > In article , helbig@astro.multiCLOTHESvax.de > (Phillip Helbig---remove CLOTHES to reply) writes: > >> It would be nice to have low-level support for CLUSTER$COMMON, > > In other words, one could add one (or more) additional translations to > SYS$SYSROOT and be sure that, internally, all stuff would use > SYS$SYSROOT and logicals defined in terms of it, like SYS$MANAGER, and > one could be sure that the right file would be picked up. There's certainly nothing stopping you from doing that yourself. When I managed a mixed architecture (VAX & Alpha) cluster, with about a zillion satelite workstations (OK, only 31 :-), I "sandwiched" the cluster common disk between SYS$SPECIFIC and SYS$COMMON; I think I even named it CLU$COMMON. In that cluster, CLU$COMMON was on the Alpha system disk (separate directory from the Alpha SYS$ROOT trees). If I did it today, I put in on a separate disk. The only trick is to redefine SYS$SYSROOT early enough in the boot. For the satelite's, I did it in SATELITE_PAGE.COM; for the "big" systems, I did it in SYPAGSWPFILE.COM, IIRC. BTW, the reason I took the "sandwich" approach was to avoid the need to duplicate all the directories under SYS$COMMON in CLU$COMMON. If you put CLU$COMMON first, or last, in the list, all directories must be present or you run into some strange or misleading error messages when a file is not present and/or when creating a new file referenced to SYS$SYSROOT (e.g., via SYS$MANAGER). It's been a while, so I'd need to do some experiments before I could be more precise... -Ken -- Ken & Ann Fairfield What: Ken dot And dot Ann Where: Gmail dot Com ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 6 Jun 2007 23:09:29 +0000 (UTC) From: helbig@astro.multiCLOTHESvax.de (Phillip Helbig---remove CLOTHES to reply) Subject: Re: SECURITY.AUDIT$JOURNAL and ERRLOG.SYS Message-ID: In article <5codduF327b3pU1@mid.individual.net>, Ken Fairfield writes: > Phillip Helbig---remove CLOTHES to reply wrote: > > In article , helbig@astro.multiCLOTHESvax.de > > (Phillip Helbig---remove CLOTHES to reply) writes: > > > >> It would be nice to have low-level support for CLUSTER$COMMON, > > > > In other words, one could add one (or more) additional translations to > > SYS$SYSROOT and be sure that, internally, all stuff would use > > SYS$SYSROOT and logicals defined in terms of it, like SYS$MANAGER, and > > one could be sure that the right file would be picked up. > > There's certainly nothing stopping you from doing that > yourself. True, but I would like to depend on everything using, say, SYS$MANAGER, and not first trying SYS$SPECIFIC:[SYSMGR] then SYS$COMMON:[SYSMGR] or whatever, i.e. code which behaves the same way as using SYS$MANAGER in the default setup, but continues to behave this way even if I redefine SYS$SYSROOT. I don't know what all the utilities are like under the hood. While one might hope that basic VMS stuff is well behaved in this area, some stuff which gets started early in the system startup (before logical names are set up?) might have some logic to pick up the right directories even though the search lists aren't yet defined, based on assumptions about how they WILL BE defined, which my own definition would violate. And, of course, the behaviour of the TCPIP stuff is another matter entirely. > When I managed a mixed architecture (VAX & Alpha) cluster, > with about a zillion satelite workstations (OK, only 31 :-), > I "sandwiched" the cluster common disk between SYS$SPECIFIC > and SYS$COMMON; I think I even named it CLU$COMMON. In that > cluster, CLU$COMMON was on the Alpha system disk (separate > directory from the Alpha SYS$ROOT trees). If I did it today, > I put in on a separate disk. I have it on a separate disk. One can argue for your position: it is more general than the node (SYS$SPECIFIC) but less general than generic stuff (SYS$COMMON). On the other hand, one could argue for my setup, i.e. more general than SYS$COMMON since it applies to all system disks and even all architectures. The root of this discrepancy, of course, is that SYS$COMMON is a mixture of stuff unique to that system disk and common to all system disks in the world (at least for the same version of VMS). > The only trick is to redefine SYS$SYSROOT early enough in > the boot. Right. > For the satelite's, I did it in SATELITE_PAGE.COM; > for the "big" systems, I did it in SYPAGSWPFILE.COM, IIRC. Is this early enough for everything? ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 06 Jun 2007 20:10:31 -0700 From: Ken Fairfield Subject: Re: SECURITY.AUDIT$JOURNAL and ERRLOG.SYS Message-ID: <5cpb5dF31vmcgU1@mid.individual.net> Phillip Helbig---remove CLOTHES to reply wrote: > In article <5codduF327b3pU1@mid.individual.net>, Ken Fairfield > writes: > >> Phillip Helbig---remove CLOTHES to reply wrote: >>> In article , helbig@astro.multiCLOTHESvax.de >>> (Phillip Helbig---remove CLOTHES to reply) writes: >>> >>>> It would be nice to have low-level support for CLUSTER$COMMON, >>> In other words, one could add one (or more) additional translations to >>> SYS$SYSROOT and be sure that, internally, all stuff would use >>> SYS$SYSROOT and logicals defined in terms of it, like SYS$MANAGER, and >>> one could be sure that the right file would be picked up. >> There's certainly nothing stopping you from doing that >> yourself. > > True, but I would like to depend on everything using, say, SYS$MANAGER, > and not first trying SYS$SPECIFIC:[SYSMGR] then SYS$COMMON:[SYSMGR] or > whatever, i.e. code which behaves the same way as using SYS$MANAGER in > the default setup, but continues to behave this way even if I redefine > SYS$SYSROOT. > > I don't know what all the utilities are like under the hood. While one > might hope that basic VMS stuff is well behaved in this area, some stuff > which gets started early in the system startup (before logical names are > set up?) might have some logic to pick up the right directories even > though the search lists aren't yet defined, based on assumptions about > how they WILL BE defined, which my own definition would violate. And, > of course, the behaviour of the TCPIP stuff is another matter entirely. Except for the very early stuff (SYSBOOT?), I think everything uses the logical names (notwithstanding some ugly stuff like WEBES which thinks it knows more about VMS than VMS does...sigh...). I never ran into anything that didn't work as expected. [...] > I have it on a separate disk. One can argue for your position: it is > more general than the node (SYS$SPECIFIC) but less general than generic > stuff (SYS$COMMON). On the other hand, one could argue for my setup, > i.e. more general than SYS$COMMON since it applies to all system disks > and even all architectures. The root of this discrepancy, of course, is > that SYS$COMMON is a mixture of stuff unique to that system disk and > common to all system disks in the world (at least for the same version > of VMS). Or one could argue that SYS$COMMON has everything a given architecture needs, but there is a lot of stuff (command files) that is same for all architectures... >> The only trick is to redefine SYS$SYSROOT early enough in >> the boot. > > Right. > >> For the satelite's, I did it in SATELITE_PAGE.COM; >> for the "big" systems, I did it in SYPAGSWPFILE.COM, IIRC. > > Is this early enough for everything? I don't recall and don't have my VMS system booted at the moment to check. Its probably more likely, in fact, that I used SYLOGICALS.COM. Look in STARTUP.COM and check the order of execution of the various SY*.COM in SYS$MANAGER, then pick the earliest one. Since I was mounting the Alpha system disk as the cluster-common disk on VAXes, I needed to both redefine the SYS$SYSROOT search-list _and_ mount the disk as early as possible (basically at the same time). That put some "odd" code into SYLOGICALS to loop with F$GETDVI waiting for the device to EXIST, then to be AVL (or AVAIL?), and then mount it. This all from memory of 7 years ago or so... Although I did post more than once to c.o.v about my technique, so the archives would be more accurate than this description. -Ken -- Ken & Ann Fairfield What: Ken dot And dot Ann Where: Gmail dot Com ------------------------------ Date: 6 Jun 2007 13:02:18 -0500 From: Kilgallen@SpamCop.net (Larry Kilgallen) Subject: Re: SSH login with expired password Message-ID: In article <4666c05d$1@news.langstoeger.at>, peter@langstoeger.at (Peter 'EPLAN' LANGSTOeGER) writes: > In article , Kilgallen@SpamCop.net (Larry Kilgallen) writes: >>In article <4666adb0$1@news.langstoeger.at>, peter@langstoeger.at (Peter 'EPLAN' LANGSTOeGER) writes: >> >>> And it would be nice if SSH doesn't require SYSUAF /NET access for login >> >>Why ? Requiring /NETWORK access is a major technique for security >>assessors to prove that privileged access is not available to remote >>users, as required by some security regulations. > > Because it is inconsistent with LAT, TELNET and CTERM login !! Sorry, I misread what you wrote. It should require /REMOTE access for security purpose. Or it could be configurable to require /REMOTE. a feature that was added for Multinet years ago. ------------------------------ Date: 6 Jun 2007 13:04:50 -0500 From: koehler@eisner.nospam.encompasserve.org (Bob Koehler) Subject: Re: SSH login with expired password Message-ID: In article , "Rich Whalen" writes: > > Making the above changes (additions) to the source that we started from was > not overly difficult, but did take some time. It also takes time to merge > the changes in again each time we get updated code from our supplier. The > TCP/IP developers are most likely deciding to spend their time on other > parts of the TCP/IP Services software. Going back to UCX days this stack and its applications have been, and continue to be, the most behind the times of all the IP stacks one can get for VMS. It would seem the TCP/IP developers are severely understaffed. ------------------------------ Date: 6 Jun 2007 12:50:00 -0500 From: koehler@eisner.nospam.encompasserve.org (Bob Koehler) Subject: Re: Story Time Message-ID: <9gthc0AsXlCV@eisner.encompasserve.org> In article , helbig@astro.multiCLOTHESvax.de (Phillip Helbig---remove CLOTHES to reply) writes: > In article , JF Mezei > writes: > >> Robert Deininger wrote: >> > Yup. That's because a new VAX release isn't even in the top 100 list of >> > things customers are asking for. >> >> I have quite a problem with this statement. (not directed at you, this >> type of argument has often been used by the onwed of VMS to justify NOT >> doing something). > > In this case, I think that it's probably true that it's not in the top > 100 things. There are so many things that are desired on VMS that would most likely be used on faster processors that I can see that a new VAX release would not be in the top 100. But I'm left wondering which customers HP is listening too. ------------------------------ Date: 6 Jun 2007 18:09:34 GMT From: bill@cs.uofs.edu (Bill Gunshannon) Subject: Re: Story Time Message-ID: <5cobiuF31qm2vU1@mid.individual.net> In article , Ron Johnson writes: > On 06/06/07 10:30, Bill Gunshannon wrote: >> In article , >> Ron Johnson writes: >>> On 06/06/07 07:58, Bill Gunshannon wrote: >>>> In article , >>>> Ron Johnson writes: >>>>> On 06/05/07 13:52, Bill Gunshannon wrote: >>>>> [snip] >>>>>> All of which applies to BSD equally except that BSD had several years >>>>>> headstart (including the development that continued despite the AT&T >>>>>> lawsuit which everyone involved in the technical side of the game knew >>>>>> was never going to go anywhere). The only thing Linux has that BSD >>>>>> does not is marketing. And look at the difference in awareness and >>>>>> interest. BSD's license is much more business friendly than the GPV. >>>>> Two words: Unix Wars. >>>> People keep mentioning that but unless your a techie it really means >>>> nothing. >>> I *am* a techie, and I *do* remember when all the various vendors >>> took BSD or licensed SVRx and "compatible" C & Unix became a >>> mismash, and then there was the OSF, Unix International, etc, none >>> of which really unified Unix. >> >> Ancient history. And irrelevant to the discussion of current BSD vs. >> Linux. > > I think that it *is* relevant because it was the "business friendly" > BSD license (which allows each company to keep it's own changes) > that caused the Unix Wars in the first place. What you call the Unix Wars is nothing different than the battling between all proprietary OSes. It's called business and yes, it is war. And while many of those Unixes are still around and kicking today they don't enter into the debate because we were comparing Free Unixes. A CIO who is going to buy AIX is going to buy AIX and the superiority of BSD over Linux doesn't enter into it. But when one is going to base their strategy on a Free Unix then one has to ask why one over the other and more importantly, why did the inferior product win the market? The only good thing that Linux has over BSD is hype and that is totally the result of strong marketing. > > The (smart) big vendors remember these things. > > Counterintuitively, the "viral" GPL (which says, in essence, "freely > you get other people's work, freely you must share your own work") Is that like forced volunteerism that is all the rage today? I can't be coerced into giving something "freely". > ensures that the Unix Wars can not happen again. Not hardly. There is at least one distro that has two versions. One they give away for free and the other you have pay for. And they openly admit the two are different. And the one you pay for has additional features not in the free one. And there are other GNU Programs that while living up to the letter of the agreement do not live up to the spirit in that they have made the source code they provide useless without paying them for the tools to work with it. > > Thus, it's sort of a neutral platform where binary compatibility is > almost guaranteed. Your joking, right? Debian won't run RedHat. RedHat won't run Slackware, etc. > > And now both IBM & HPaq are selling boat-loads of Linux-installed > servers & blades, making both very happy. IBM is probably also > selling lots of Linux-running POWER systems in compute farms where > AIX isn't needed. Yeah, I know and that is even more confusing (and I fear does not bode well for the industry). Why would IBM push Linux? I admit to being baffled by that one. > >> Considering how unlikely it is that any CIO today has ever heard >> of BSD it is even more unlikely that they know what the "Unix Wars" were. >> >> >>> And while the Unix vendors were fighting, VMS slid and MSFT became >>> unstoppably dominant. >> >> And yet, Linux is rapidly moving into the datacenter. And the whole >> point of what I said was, "Why Linux? Why not BSD?" > > See the previous paragraphs regarding the BSD & GPL licenses. I doubt the license has anything to do with it. The BSD is much more business friendly and the GPL is extremely dangerous (in the business sense). The only real difference I can see is they all know what Linux is, afterall it's in all the trade journals everyday. When have you ever seen more than a casual mention of a current BSD in one? Sound like VMS again? > >> And the answer >> remains the same as the answer to. "Why not VMS?" > > Up-front costs and COTS hardware. While that may contribute, I think the lack of knowledge caused by the current stealth marketing is much more to blame. Even back in my days selling systems it was always pointed out to me that the cost of the hardware was in most cases a rather insignificant portion of the overall cost of establishing and operating a system. And, it's write-off money anyway. > >>>> There are currently three popular BSD distributions. How >>>> many Linux distros are out there today? And anyone running commodity >>>> COTS boxes is going to learn with very little research that FreeBSD >>>> is the one that concentrated on and optimized for that platform. >>> I remember when ftp.cdrom.com ran off a modestly powered FreeBSD box. >> >> I have been running this department off of modeswtly powered FreeBSD >> boxes for years. I ran a news server that actually made it into the >> top 100 (I don't remember how high it actually got but it was impressive >> considering my total lack of a budget to support it!) running FreeBSD >> on comodity boxes. >> >>> Anyway, Linux has commercial products like Oracle and engineering >>> CAD apps, important free packages like Sun Java (although >>> compatibility modules might let it run on FreeBSD) and the drivers >>> to get full usage of my NVIDIA video card. >> >> Which comes back to the same issue. Why not FreeBSD? It is empirically >> provable that it is better, technically, than Linux. And the answer is, >> once agsain the same as why ISV's are leaving the VMS camp in favor of >> Linux. >> >>> Overall, though, you won't hear me complaining because you run FreeBSD. >> >> Well, you certainly won't hear me complain. We once tried to use Linux >> to do the job because people wanted the more popular option. It took >> less than one semester to have all of them learn what a mistake Linux >> really was. We have never looked back and Linux will never have a >> place in our server farm as long as I am the Admin here. > > I'd *REALLY* like to hear what the problem with Linux was. Are you really serious? Broken LPD. Badly broken NFS. Extremely inefficient IP stack because of NIH Syndrom. > >>>> Now, >>>> if your running 15 year old Sparc boxes...... >>> NetBSD, anyone? :) >>> >>> Linux (Debian, specifically) will also run on most of those boxes. >> >> Of course it will, But if you are trying to set up an efficient operation >> running on commodity COTS x86 boxes why would you want to use something >> that has code in it targeted at other architectures. Give me the one >> optimized for my platform every time. > > And if you chose the losing platform... The industry has chosen x86. Why would I want to run a version of an OS that had to do or not do something in order to maintain support for Sparc or PARisc? That was my point. Of course, I assume Linux falls into the same catagory as Open|Net BSD as it also claims support for all these other oddball systems. Hmmmm... Maybe that explains some of the inefficiency. > > (Not that x86 will lose any time soon, but you get my point.) > > [snip] >>>> >>>>> You'd be stunned by the disagreements between major kernel >>>>> developers on the linux-kernel mailing list (lkml). >>>> Actually, no I wouldn't. Children squabble all the time. >>> Oh, you mean Theo de Raadt?? :0 >> >> Yeah, but then he doesn't control FreeBSD, does he? > > He leads a BSD. And not the one I would recommend to anyone planning on using x86 COTS boxes. So, irrelevant to the discussion at hand. When someone says, "It's my ball and we play by my rules." I usually just go find another game. > >>>>> But when >>>>> someone brings a well-written (meaning: it follows Linus' coding >>>>> standards) chunk of code to the table that implements a new feature >>>>> (usually a driver) or replaces old code (and is demonstrably better >>>>> (faster, simpler, uses less memory) it is accepted. >>>> And this is different from FreeBSD in what manner? >>> We're superior, just.... because. >>> >>> But seriously: this quote is specifically about NetBSD, but also >>> makes a similar comment regarding FreeBSD. >>> >>> http://mail-index.netbsd.org/netbsd-users/2006/08/30/0016.html >>> Partly due to lack of people, and partly due to a more >>> corporate mentality, projects were often "locked". One >>> person would say they were working on a project, and >>> everyone else would be told to refer to them. Often these >>> projects stagnated, or never progressed at all. If they >>> did, the motivators were often very slow. As a result, >>> many important projects have moved at a glacial pace, or >>> never materialized at all. >>> [snip] >>> FreeBSD and XFree86, for example, have both forked successor >>> projects (Dragonfly and X.org) for very similar reasons. >> >> I sure don't see any stagnation in FreeBSD. I only upgrade once or >> at most twice a year (summer is primary, between Fall and Spring is >> an option if we really need to change for some reason) and it still >> usually leaves me behind a version or two. How often do commercial >> vendors release new versions of their OSes? Now, if you meant all >> those stupid little games and less useful (I will avoid calling them >> totally useless, but in the sense of running a server farm for a >> production environment, they are) programs, anything goes as they >> are not controlled by any central "authority". >> >> But, to reiterate the original theme, if marketing can make such a >> success out of a piece of crap like Linux, just think what it could, >> no would do for a gem like VMS. > > If techies (not sheeple) really thought that Linux was a steaming > pile of dung, it wouldn't have lasted this long. What techies? All those prepubescent teens without girlfriends who put up a website in their parents basement during the dot.com boom who now skew the unemployment numbers by claiming to be "un-employed IT professionals" today? As for the success of a "steaming pile of dung", just look at Windows XP. bill -- Bill Gunshannon | de-moc-ra-cy (di mok' ra see) n. Three wolves bill@cs.scranton.edu | and a sheep voting on what's for dinner. University of Scranton | Scranton, Pennsylvania | #include ------------------------------ Date: 6 Jun 2007 18:16:18 GMT From: bill@cs.uofs.edu (Bill Gunshannon) Subject: Re: Story Time Message-ID: <5cobviF31qm2vU2@mid.individual.net> In article <07060610033078_202002DA@antinode.org>, sms@antinode.org (Steven M. Schweda) writes: > From: "Richard B. Gilbert" > >> It's not clear to me why a VMS programmer should want/need a Unix style >> fork. If you really need a Unix environment, use Unix. FWIW, I believe >> that many or most of the useful Unix utilities can be, or already have >> been, ported to VMS. > > Well, duh. If people are porting UNIX utilities to VMS, then it's > just possible that those utilities are useful in a VMS environment. > It's also fairly likely that, as written, those utilities expect to use > fork(). Re-coding every one of these utilities to work around the lack > of fork() is what turns a simple exercise into a project, and a project > into a trial by ordeal. > > For example, one of those already-been-ported UNIX utilities is > "tar". A modern GNU "tar" wants to use fork(). Go ahead, cite VMSTAR. > I dare you. Well, in defense of Unix, "A modern GNU" anything probably tries to violate the underlying paradigm that is Unix by including everything in one program rather than doing one task well and leaving other tasks to other programs. (In case you can't see through this, I can see absolutely no reason why tar would need to fork() anything!!) bill -- Bill Gunshannon | de-moc-ra-cy (di mok' ra see) n. Three wolves bill@cs.scranton.edu | and a sheep voting on what's for dinner. University of Scranton | Scranton, Pennsylvania | #include ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 06 Jun 2007 15:14:14 -0400 From: JF Mezei Subject: Re: Story Time Message-ID: <18bce$466707ba$cef8887a$11966@TEKSAVVY.COM> Bob Koehler wrote: > There are so many things that are desired on VMS that would most > likely be used on faster processors that I can see that a new VAX > release would not be in the top 100. How come then HP committed to do an 8.x release of VAX ? The issue here is of trust. But not doing an 8.x version of VAX, HP is renegging on a promise, and this underlines the fact that the roadmap is just a work of fiction that customers cannot count on when they make their own IT roadmaps. It is still interesting to read. However, I think that the decision making process on what has priority and doesn't should be more transparent, or HP should stop claiming things such as "customers have said they are not interested in this". Perhaps VMS management should have a public email address where customers can send their request for features, and customers should be encouraged to do so. Yeah, I am sure there is such a mailbox and that VMS management can claim they are listening and get no feedback. But you need to read your customer base to tell them about this secret mailbox if you want feedback. It is called staying in touch with your customers. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 06 Jun 2007 15:22:19 -0400 From: JF Mezei Subject: Re: Story Time Message-ID: <8e4b7$4667099e$cef8887a$12666@TEKSAVVY.COM> Bill Gunshannon wrote: > Yeah, I know and that is even more confusing (and I fear does not bode > well for the industry). Why would IBM push Linux? I admit to being > baffled by that one. Very smart move for IBM. IBM had an image of old, stodgy blue suits that only dealt with large corporations and only know about MVS, SNA and mainframes. IBM badly needed to tell the world it could also dab into modern technologies such as web servers, TCPIP , Unix etc. By jumping into the Linux bandwagon early, it was able to market itself as a company able to deal with today's new trendy technology, and leverage its "serious" experience to make the linux trendy toy work for business. And if the customer outgrows its Linux boxes, IBM can then showcase its other products. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 06 Jun 2007 16:11:29 -0500 From: Ron Johnson Subject: Re: Story Time Message-ID: <6qF9i.92829$vE1.77432@newsfe24.lga> On 06/06/07 13:09, Bill Gunshannon wrote: > In article , > Ron Johnson writes: >> On 06/06/07 10:30, Bill Gunshannon wrote: >>> In article , >>> Ron Johnson writes: >>>> On 06/06/07 07:58, Bill Gunshannon wrote: >>>>> In article , >>>>> Ron Johnson writes: >>>>>> On 06/05/07 13:52, Bill Gunshannon wrote: >>>>>> [snip] >>>>>>> All of which applies to BSD equally except that BSD had several years >>>>>>> headstart (including the development that continued despite the AT&T >>>>>>> lawsuit which everyone involved in the technical side of the game knew >>>>>>> was never going to go anywhere). The only thing Linux has that BSD >>>>>>> does not is marketing. And look at the difference in awareness and >>>>>>> interest. BSD's license is much more business friendly than the GPV. >>>>>> Two words: Unix Wars. >>>>> People keep mentioning that but unless your a techie it really means >>>>> nothing. >>>> I *am* a techie, and I *do* remember when all the various vendors >>>> took BSD or licensed SVRx and "compatible" C & Unix became a >>>> mismash, and then there was the OSF, Unix International, etc, none >>>> of which really unified Unix. >>> Ancient history. And irrelevant to the discussion of current BSD vs. >>> Linux. >> I think that it *is* relevant because it was the "business friendly" >> BSD license (which allows each company to keep it's own changes) >> that caused the Unix Wars in the first place. > > What you call the Unix Wars is nothing different than the battling > between all proprietary OSes. It's called business and yes, it is > war. And while many of those Unixes are still around and kicking > today they don't enter into the debate because we were comparing > Free Unixes. A CIO who is going to buy AIX is going to buy AIX and > the superiority of BSD over Linux doesn't enter into it. But when > one is going to base their strategy on a Free Unix then one has to > ask why one over the other and more importantly, why did the inferior > product win the market? The only good thing that Linux has over BSD > is hype and that is totally the result of strong marketing. > >> The (smart) big vendors remember these things. >> >> Counterintuitively, the "viral" GPL (which says, in essence, "freely >> you get other people's work, freely you must share your own work") > > Is that like forced volunteerism that is all the rage today? I can't > be coerced into giving something "freely". Coerced? No. It's called rule of law. To use any code that is not public domain, you must agree to the license. In this case, the General Public License says that "you" can freely use "his" code, but that if you distribute the subsequent binaries to anyone else, you must share your changes with "them". Think of it as payment for "his" code. >> ensures that the Unix Wars can not happen again. > > Not hardly. There is at least one distro that has two versions. One > they give away for free and the other you have pay for. And they openly > admit the two are different. And the one you pay for has additional > features not in the free one. RH and SuSE do that. > And there are other GNU Programs that > while living up to the letter of the agreement do not live up to the > spirit in that they have made the source code they provide useless > without paying them for the tools to work with it. Tivo? The RH "commercial" version does have some closed-source features, but CentOS makes a (rather popular) fully functional distro using the same sources that RH Advanced/Enterprise Server uses. >> Thus, it's sort of a neutral platform where binary compatibility is >> almost guaranteed. > > Your joking, right? Debian won't run RedHat. RedHat won't run Slackware, > etc. There *is* a high likelihood, if all the distro versions are of the same vintage. [snip] >>> >>>> Overall, though, you won't hear me complaining because you run FreeBSD. >>> Well, you certainly won't hear me complain. We once tried to use Linux >>> to do the job because people wanted the more popular option. It took >>> less than one semester to have all of them learn what a mistake Linux >>> really was. We have never looked back and Linux will never have a >>> place in our server farm as long as I am the Admin here. >> I'd *REALLY* like to hear what the problem with Linux was. > > Are you really serious? Broken LPD. lpd? Who in Linux uses lpd? > Badly broken NFS. Yes, I've heard it's not the most efficient. > Extremely > inefficient IP stack because of NIH Syndrom. None of the benchmarks I've seen show that it's "bad". Maybe the particular driver for the NICs you were using... [snip] >>> >>> But, to reiterate the original theme, if marketing can make such a >>> success out of a piece of crap like Linux, just think what it could, >>> no would do for a gem like VMS. >> If techies (not sheeple) really thought that Linux was a steaming >> pile of dung, it wouldn't have lasted this long. > > What techies? All those prepubescent teens without girlfriends who > put up a website in their parents basement during the dot.com boom > who now skew the unemployment numbers by claiming to be "un-employed > IT professionals" today? Great ad hominem, but, ummm, no. > As for the success of a "steaming pile of dung", just look at Windows XP. -- Ron Johnson, Jr. Jefferson LA USA Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day. Hit him with a fish, and he goes away for good! ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 7 Jun 2007 08:01:54 +1000 From: "Gremlin" Subject: Re: Story Time Message-ID: <136ebmkmhv93a35@corp.supernews.com> Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia "Bill Gunshannon" wrote in message news:5cnq1hF30r09tU3@mid.individual.net... > In article <136ccqgi8jca08b@corp.supernews.com>, > "Gremlin" writes: >> Hi Bill (and all) >> >> I run a postrgraduate course in (amongst other things) commercial >> operating > > What school? > >> systems security. We cover (in some detail) z/OS, i5/OS, OpenVMS, HP/UX >> 11i, Solaris 10, Windows Server and several Linuxes. This is a "hands >> on" >> course demonstrating practical background, risks, vulnerabilities, >> commercial considerations, standards and frameworks (SOX, HIPPA, >> ISO17799, >> ISO27001, ISM3, AS/NZS4360 etc) and how "commercial" operating systems >> have >> different risk profiles by the way they are designed and operated. Also >> included is the opportunity to hack into any of these OSs as they are >> installed as plain vanilla installations with a web and mail server >> running, >> patched according to the vendors' specifications. >> >> So, Solaris 10, Windows, Linux and HP/UX are regularly hacked and >> trashed. >> The students all fail to get into z/OS, i5/OS and OpenVMS - then, as part >> of >> their assignments, most arrive at the ame opinion (even the Linux >> promoters), that OpenVMS seems really good - why haven't they heard of >> it? >> >> So at least at this univiersity in my courses they get some exposure and >> come to realise that the commerical world is not just >> Windows/Linux/UNIX - >> perhaps HP could pay attention? > > I tried to make the point that this knowledge was important for our > students. It was a minority opinion.o > > bill > > -- > Bill Gunshannon | de-moc-ra-cy (di mok' ra see) n. Three wolves > bill@cs.scranton.edu | and a sheep voting on what's for dinner. > University of Scranton | > Scranton, Pennsylvania | #include ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 06 Jun 2007 22:13:49 -0000 From: davidc@montagar.com Subject: Re: Story Time Message-ID: <1181168029.866585.96120@o11g2000prd.googlegroups.com> On Jun 5, 1:52 pm, b...@cs.uofs.edu (Bill Gunshannon) wrote: > All of which applies to BSD equally except that BSD had several years > headstart (including the development that continued despite the AT&T > lawsuit which everyone involved in the technical side of the game knew > was never going to go anywhere). The only thing Linux has that BSD > does not is marketing. False. The GPL attracted a lot of people to the Linux platform. The BSD license allows a company to profit off the work of someone else without compensation or credit. The GPL doesn't allow this. You either get credited and/or compensated. > And look at the difference in awareness and > interest. BSD's license is much more business friendly than the GPV. > BSD is stabler, more secure, more efficient and has more stuff that > was actually implemented correctly than Linux. And still businesses > are flocking to Linux and ignoring BSD. And the answer is, marketing. > Ask any CIO you know who is involved in one of these Linux migrations > why Linux and not BSD. The most likely answer will be, "What's BSD?" > Sure sounds like the same boat VMS is in to me. :-) That would be G. P. L., and yes the BSD license is more friendly to the business, but to the individual programmers, the GPL can often be more attractive, for reasons stated above. Word of mouth is what is at work here. As developers become interested in the platform, they play with it, books get written, the interest feeds upon itself. I submit to you that Linux would have succeeded regardless of IBM's marketing dollars. During the developement of Linux, Bill Gates spent more money wiping his butt with $20 bills than Linux had in marketing. Yet, you didn't see developers give up, wail about lack of marketing dollars, and bitch and moan about it in forums. If what you believe were true, Linux NEVER would have succeeded. But it did. If all that work hadn't have been done FIRST, there wouldn't have been anything to market at all. Why it succeeded was because of the community. I believe that is going to be what makes VMS stronger, too. A good solid community of developers and users working toward the goal regardless of what HP does. If there aren't tools and apps ported to OpenVMS, then OpenVMS is an O/S with no purpose - and no amount of marketnig dollars can fix that. The product, and assoicated side products, must be there first. But if you can't lead or follow, at least don't start by assuming there's no point in trying. That's why HP has been doing programs like the HP Integrity Developers Workshops (which, I think is a marketing effort costing in the hundreds of thousands of dollars), free downloads of software for DSPP, free Integrity SDK kits shipped to you simply for the asking, and more. But I'm sorry Bill. That probably isn't enough for you. > I am not spinning anything. Name the applications that people are most > likely to want. Then look at what they contain. Actually, the obsolete > version of X11 that is available for VMS is probably the bigger show > stopper as desktop apps are what sells computers today. But there are > still alot of cute little things with fork() in them. And that list > was not meant to be exclusive. It just pointed out the two most common > shortcomings frequently mentioned here everytime this subjecy comes up. Yes you are. You are already predicting failure of porting software even before anyone STARTS. You use two issues and predict 100% failure right out of the gate. I guess you aren't capable of working around fork(), but please don't convince others they can't before they start. Most of the time fork() is called, it's to detach a process anyway (fork followed by exec) and can be replaced with a call to LIB $SPAWN or SYS$CREPRC. As for X11, you are seriously out of touch since rarely do people program X11 calls. The only ones that do are those developing window managers or maintaining the GUI toolkits like GTK or wxWidgets. The rest are using those toolkits like GTK+ or wxWidgets. I have a commercial app which runs on X via GTK+. Exact same code runs on Windows, too. The intelligent observer will notice that Windows does not have any X11 whatsoever. And the server portion doesn't use fork(), either. I actually have programmed X11 before, and never again. Much better to use a higher level toolkit, especially one that's implemented across more than one platform. Are all cases easy? No. Should that mean that no one should even try? I don't think so. > Console apps don't sell computers or OSes today. I have a closet full > of VT terminals the University abandoned to prove it. All they were > used for was Registration, twice a year and that is no longer done > with character cell applications. And, if it's so simple and VSM has > all the pieces needed, let me know when you have OpenOffice running. Nearly every day I see someone working on a "GUI" that's really just a Windows PC using an 3270 emulator or telnet window into a console app. You are appearently out of touch with how common console apps still are today. > I have never said that HP was trying to kill VMS. In fact, I doubt they > would expend the energy. It is sufficient to just continue to ignore it > while milking the cash cow until the last user finally leaves. The point > I and many others have made is that it would take minimal effort to reverse > the trend that has been seen with VMS the last daceade or so. A few thousand > dollars for marketing. Giving a few good stories to the press. Anything > to convince the people buying IT today that there is a future in buying > and running VMS. Exactly what I've been saying, no matter what HP does, you and others trot out the same laundry list of excuses. There are thousands of dollars in marketing and success stories. But each time one's posted here, you always hear it's not enough, too little too late, etc. > I can't be part of the problem because I am not even in the equation. > But if you think the solution is in sticking my head in the sand like > so many others, then I admit I am not going to be part of the solution. But you are part of the problem. Believe it or not, Sue sometimes has to do damage control from people like you shooting off your mouth. This group is supposed to be a group for advocacy. Oft times, you wouldn't think so to read it. So yes, you are part of the problem. > What stops you from using SourceForge? I haven't looked at it but I > was not aware of anything that restricted projects to Linux. Nothing. Well, a better cvs client would be nice. Strength is going to come from community. Having a place where VMS can be the central focus, rather than getting lost in the myriad of other proejcts would be a benefit. ------------------------------ Date: 6 Jun 2007 22:50:32 GMT From: bill@cs.uofs.edu (Bill Gunshannon) Subject: Re: Story Time Message-ID: <5cos1oF31ok00U1@mid.individual.net> In article <6qF9i.92829$vE1.77432@newsfe24.lga>, Ron Johnson writes: > On 06/06/07 13:09, Bill Gunshannon wrote: >> In article , >> Ron Johnson writes: >>> On 06/06/07 10:30, Bill Gunshannon wrote: >>>> In article , >>>> Ron Johnson writes: >>>>> On 06/06/07 07:58, Bill Gunshannon wrote: >>>>>> In article , >>>>>> Ron Johnson writes: >>>>>>> On 06/05/07 13:52, Bill Gunshannon wrote: >>>>>>> [snip] >>>>>>>> All of which applies to BSD equally except that BSD had several years >>>>>>>> headstart (including the development that continued despite the AT&T >>>>>>>> lawsuit which everyone involved in the technical side of the game knew >>>>>>>> was never going to go anywhere). The only thing Linux has that BSD >>>>>>>> does not is marketing. And look at the difference in awareness and >>>>>>>> interest. BSD's license is much more business friendly than the GPV. >>>>>>> Two words: Unix Wars. >>>>>> People keep mentioning that but unless your a techie it really means >>>>>> nothing. >>>>> I *am* a techie, and I *do* remember when all the various vendors >>>>> took BSD or licensed SVRx and "compatible" C & Unix became a >>>>> mismash, and then there was the OSF, Unix International, etc, none >>>>> of which really unified Unix. >>>> Ancient history. And irrelevant to the discussion of current BSD vs. >>>> Linux. >>> I think that it *is* relevant because it was the "business friendly" >>> BSD license (which allows each company to keep it's own changes) >>> that caused the Unix Wars in the first place. >> >> What you call the Unix Wars is nothing different than the battling >> between all proprietary OSes. It's called business and yes, it is >> war. And while many of those Unixes are still around and kicking >> today they don't enter into the debate because we were comparing >> Free Unixes. A CIO who is going to buy AIX is going to buy AIX and >> the superiority of BSD over Linux doesn't enter into it. But when >> one is going to base their strategy on a Free Unix then one has to >> ask why one over the other and more importantly, why did the inferior >> product win the market? The only good thing that Linux has over BSD >> is hype and that is totally the result of strong marketing. >> >>> The (smart) big vendors remember these things. >>> >>> Counterintuitively, the "viral" GPL (which says, in essence, "freely >>> you get other people's work, freely you must share your own work") >> >> Is that like forced volunteerism that is all the rage today? I can't >> be coerced into giving something "freely". > > Coerced? No. It's called rule of law. It has nothing to do with law other than relying on it to support them. When you put strings on the use of something it isn't free. You said, "If I do a then I must do B". That takes away my freedom to not do B. That's coercion. > > To use any code that is not public domain, you must agree to the > license. In this case, the General Public License says that "you" > can freely use "his" code, but that if you distribute the subsequent > binaries to anyone else, you must share your changes with "them". > > Think of it as payment for "his" code. Payment? I thought this was "free" software. That is what they like to claim. Fact is, it is encumbered just like the old AT&T code was. The only difference is AT&T openly claimed theirs was encumbered and GNU claims theirs is free. > >>> ensures that the Unix Wars can not happen again. >> >> Not hardly. There is at least one distro that has two versions. One >> they give away for free and the other you have pay for. And they openly >> admit the two are different. And the one you pay for has additional >> features not in the free one. > > RH and SuSE do that. You seem to take that rather calmly for someone who seems to think the BPL is a good thing, but isn't that contrary to the GPL? > >> And there are other GNU Programs that >> while living up to the letter of the agreement do not live up to the >> spirit in that they have made the source code they provide useless >> without paying them for the tools to work with it. > > Tivo? Don't know about Tivo as not being a television addict I have never used one. I was thinking of something totally software. > > The RH "commercial" version does have some closed-source features, And this doesn't violate the GPL? Strange! > but CentOS makes a (rather popular) fully functional distro using > the same sources that RH Advanced/Enterprise Server uses. Oh great, yet another Linux distro. What was it you said about Unix Wars? > >>> Thus, it's sort of a neutral platform where binary compatibility is >>> almost guaranteed. >> >> Your joking, right? Debian won't run RedHat. RedHat won't run Slackware, >> etc. > > There *is* a high likelihood, if all the distro versions are of the > same vintage. A high likelihood is not much use if it turns out you have the wrong version. I have Knoppix on a mach8ine at home for testing things and I find very little that will actually work with it. And then, I have my Nokia 770 which is Linux based and is very selective about what it will run. > > [snip] >>>> >>>>> Overall, though, you won't hear me complaining because you run FreeBSD. >>>> Well, you certainly won't hear me complain. We once tried to use Linux >>>> to do the job because people wanted the more popular option. It took >>>> less than one semester to have all of them learn what a mistake Linux >>>> really was. We have never looked back and Linux will never have a >>>> place in our server farm as long as I am the Admin here. >>> I'd *REALLY* like to hear what the problem with Linux was. >> >> Are you really serious? Broken LPD. > > lpd? Who in Linux uses lpd? Anybody who has to support a heterogenous network. Even MS got it right but not Linux. > >> Badly broken NFS. > > Yes, I've heard it's not the most efficient. Efficiency is one matter, broken is another. (Hint: set up a test network. NFS mount a directory. Boot the NFS Server. All of the clients will need to be re-booted before they can access the file- system again. NFS is supposed to be stateless!!) > >> Extremely >> inefficient IP stack because of NIH Syndrom. > > None of the benchmarks I've seen show that it's "bad". Maybe the > particular driver for the NICs you were using... Must be using the wrong benchmarks. Every one I ever ran showed Linux way behind. > > [snip] >>>> >>>> But, to reiterate the original theme, if marketing can make such a >>>> success out of a piece of crap like Linux, just think what it could, >>>> no would do for a gem like VMS. >>> If techies (not sheeple) really thought that Linux was a steaming >>> pile of dung, it wouldn't have lasted this long. >> >> What techies? All those prepubescent teens without girlfriends who >> put up a website in their parents basement during the dot.com boom >> who now skew the unemployment numbers by claiming to be "un-employed >> IT professionals" today? > > Great ad hominem, but, ummm, no. Is an "ad hominem" still an "ad hominem" when it's true? We have had the chance to see lots of these geniuses show up here. Freshman who want credit for courses without taking them becuas ethey have been running "businesses" since they were high school sophomores. They seldom do well and in a number of cases have either changed major to something other than CS/CIS or just plain dropped out. bill -- Bill Gunshannon | de-moc-ra-cy (di mok' ra see) n. Three wolves bill@cs.scranton.edu | and a sheep voting on what's for dinner. University of Scranton | Scranton, Pennsylvania | #include ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 07 Jun 2007 01:33:05 +0200 From: "P. Sture" Subject: Re: Story Time Message-ID: In article , Ron Johnson wrote: > VMS is secure from the get-go, but Linux not so much. Is SELinux > enabled? If so, then what profiles are enabled/created? (SELinux > was designed to bring mainframe/VMS-style security to Linux.) is SELinux widely available, and if so, widely adopted? Disclaimer:- I know next to nothing about SELinux, or what its capabilities are. -- Paul Sture ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 06 Jun 2007 21:57:08 -0500 From: Ron Johnson Subject: Re: Story Time Message-ID: <9uK9i.92896$vE1.21125@newsfe24.lga> On 06/06/07 18:33, P. Sture wrote: > In article , > Ron Johnson wrote: > >> VMS is secure from the get-go, but Linux not so much. Is SELinux >> enabled? If so, then what profiles are enabled/created? (SELinux >> was designed to bring mainframe/VMS-style security to Linux.) > > is SELinux widely available, and if so, widely adopted? Yes. It's a standard part of the main kernel tree, written by the NSA in order to bring better-than-Unix security to Linux. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SELinux Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux) is an implementation of mandatory access control using Linux Security Modules (LSM) in the Linux kernel, based on the /principle of least privilege/. It is not a Linux distribution, but rather a set of modifications that can be applied to Unix-like operating systems, such as Linux and BSD. [snip] Security-enhanced Linux is a FLASK implementation integrated in some versions of the Linux kernel with a number of utilities designed to demonstrate the value of mandatory access controls to the Linux community and how such controls could be added to Linux. Such a kernel contains architectural components prototyped in the Fluke operating system. These provide general support for enforcing many kinds of mandatory access control policies, including those based on the concepts of type enforcement, role-based access control, and multi-level security. Observers of operating system security research may recall DTOS, a Mach-derived Distributed Trusted Operating System, on which Flask was based, as well as Trusted Mach, a research project from Trusted Information Systems that was influential in the design and implementation of DTOS. Those interested in Type Enforcement may also be interested in Domain and Type Enforcement. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExecShield also helps (and is Linux- specific) as does mudflap, which is available to all programs built with GCC. > Disclaimer:- I know next to nothing about SELinux, or what its > capabilities are. > -- Ron Johnson, Jr. Jefferson LA USA Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day. Hit him with a fish, and he goes away for good! ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 06 Jun 2007 11:51:22 -0700 From: H Vlems Subject: Re: Thin wire Coax Ethernet on Alpha Message-ID: <1181155882.582078.209090@j4g2000prf.googlegroups.com> On 5 jun, 19:56, Jim Mehlhop wrote: > Anyone know of a particular Ethernet board with Thin Wire Coax (10MB) > connectorr that will run on an Alpha?? The KZPSM-AA (aka as 54-23248-01) will do exactly that. I paid US$10 for it, about 4 months ago on eBay Hans ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 6 Jun 2007 17:28:28 -0400 From: "warren sander" Subject: Re: VMS Update Monday June 4th Message-ID: Yes it was a huge conspiracy, the guy that gets the alerts when a port on the network switch I use for external connectivity retired effective the end of may, and then my port went belly up and the alert bounced. They have fixed the issue. and fixed the notifications also. -warren "Ron Johnson" wrote in message news:Wkn9i.116266$NK5.6117@newsfe23.lga... > On 06/05/07 12:45, Peter 'EPLAN' LANGSTOeGER wrote: >> In article <1181064128.626642.89200@w5g2000hsg.googlegroups.com>, >> "johnhreinhardt@yahoo.com" writes: >>> On Jun 5, 12:34 pm, t...@kednos.com wrote: >>>>>> Alphabetical listing of OpenVMS business partners and profiles >>>>>> http://h71000.www7.hp.com/partners/index.html >>>> I couldn't get that page to open up. >>> It worked for me. Firefox 2.0.0.4 and Safari 2.0.4 (419.3) on Mac OS >>> X 10.4.8 >> >> OpenVMS Website was down/unreachable today for hours. > > > Orrrrrrrr, is HP actively trying to subvert VMS? > > >> Network Switch again? >> > > > -- > Ron Johnson, Jr. > Jefferson LA USA > > Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day. > Hit him with a fish, and he goes away for good! ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 06 Jun 2007 21:44:22 -0000 From: signem@gmail.com Subject: Re: VMS Update Monday June 4th Message-ID: <1181166262.942600.31740@o11g2000prd.googlegroups.com> > Yes but this "self certification" process is vague. No pointer to > any URL explaining it and no details on the certification letter. > Brian, When my database team gets information from you telling them that the product is ready on Integrity, they will ask if you would like to do your certification letter. Since Word documents are a problem, you can just request that they send you the information in text format. Then you create your letter and mail it or fax it in to the contacts in DSPP who publish it on their website. Signe ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 6 Jun 2007 17:57:00 -0400 From: "John Smith" Subject: Re: VMS Update Monday June 4th Message-ID: <9c3bd$46672da5$cef885cb$20267@TEKSAVVY.COM-Free> VAXman- @SendSpamHere.ORG wrote: > In article <1181095050.228297.231360@n4g2000hsb.googlegroups.com>, > Sue writes: >> {...snip...} >> >> One of the Partners sent me the following >>> From the top of the cited web page "Following is a list of featured >> OpenVMS partners. This list includes partners that have ported their >> applications to HP Integrity servers (Integrity ready) and partners >> that have submitted certification letters (Integrity certified)." > > I read that. I didn't know about the "Certified". So, if I have an > application that I've ported to Itanium, it is Integrity ready. If > I file a form with HP stating that fact, it is Integrity certified. > Seems simple enough. Seems to me that the twice yearly PITA fax process is something HP ought to pay compensation to the ISV for, even if it some token amount, say $50 per annum - for the privilege of HP being able to still say it has 'some' ISV partners for VMS. Hoever, instead of the random fax number within the bowels of HP, I would suggest that all VMS ISV partners who frequent c.o.v. send the certification forms en-mass to Mark Hurd twice yearly, (some co-ordination required amongst participants to do this) with the cover letter to said bundle of certifications asking him in blunt language just when the f!ck HP is going to spend real money effectively advertising and marketing VMS. -- OpenVMS - The never-advertised operating system with the dwindling ISV base. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 6 Jun 2007 18:01:03 -0400 From: "John Smith" Subject: Re: VMS Update Monday June 4th Message-ID: Sue wrote: > On Jun 4, 11:18 pm, "Martin Vorlaender" wrote: >> On Tue, 05 Jun 2007 00:47:26 +0200, Sue >> wrote: >>> Did you know that openvms.org was in three languages, French, Dutch >>> and Italian? >> >> ... and German.http://de.openvms.org/ >> >> cu, >> Martin >> -- >> One OS to rule them all | Martin Vorlaender | OpenVMS rules! >> One OS to find them | work: m...@pdv-systeme.de >> One OS to bring them all | >> http://www.pdv-systeme.de/users/martinv/ And in the Darkness bind >> them.| home: martin.vorlaen...@t-online.de > > How could I forget my dear friends in Germany, we have such a > wonderful time when we are together. Not to mention how well everyone > treated me at DECUS. They really know what extended famil is!!! I > have new brothers now. > > Sue You missed another one - when did English stop being a language? English is a foreign language to most of the world, so don't go all 'Amurican'-centric on us. -- OpenVMS - The never-advertised operating system with the dwindling ISV base. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 06 Jun 2007 18:03:07 -0400 From: JF Mezei Subject: Re: VMS Update Monday June 4th Message-ID: <9206b$46672f4f$cef8887a$24784@TEKSAVVY.COM> warren sander wrote: > Yes it was a huge conspiracy, Hey ! You heard it here first folks ! Undeniable testimony that proves all conspiracy theories against VMS ;-} "they" told you the guy retired. But in fact, "they" told the guy to just not respond to VMS related alerts, and "they" told you that he had retired as the excuse for him not acting on VMS related alerts. > They have fixed the issue. and fixed the notifications also. So they fixed the issue by un-retiring the guy ? Who are "THEY" ? Are they dressed in black suits ? Have there been black helicopters hovering near ZKO lately ? Beware, the NSA will probably be listening in on all your telephone and internet exchanges. They've put "VMS" in their watchlist of keywords that trigger special attention since they have been told by HP that since VMS is dead, only terrorists would still be using VMS. In order to help these efforts, here is my contribution: bomb, U232, VAX, centrifuge, decserver200, radiological device, chemical weapon: Cheez wiz, VMS , anthrax. There is a new agent in the men in black: Agent Orange. Scheduler to detonate a batch job in sys$batch. Using an SMS from mobile phone to trigger an AST. Routing of self triggering packets through a tunnel. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 06 Jun 2007 20:28:33 -0700 From: Sue Subject: Re: VMS Update Monday June 4th Message-ID: <1181186913.298750.110010@p77g2000hsh.googlegroups.com> On Jun 6, 7:22 am, "P. Sture" wrote: > In article <37b37$46662ce9$cef8887a$20...@TEKSAVVY.COM>, > JF Mezei wrote: > > > Sue wrote: > > > > Did you even see the part about joining the DEC web site? > > > The one abouthttp://www.decedout.orgthat invites people to join it, > > even if they are not ex-dec employees ? No, I didn't see it. :-) > > Membership appears to be for US and Canadian residents only. Is there > any equivalent organisation for the rest of the world? > > -- > Paul Sture Membership is worldwide I checked with them today. Sue ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 06 Jun 2007 20:30:46 -0700 From: Sue Subject: Re: VMS Update Monday June 4th Message-ID: <1181187046.631566.48530@q69g2000hsb.googlegroups.com> On Jun 6, 6:27 am, Rozagy wrote: > On Jun 6, 2:28?am, David J Dachtera > wrote: > > > > > > > sig...@gmail.com wrote: > > > [snip] > > > We welcome input from vocal customers and partners. Come on folks. Put > > > your energies to positive use. > > > A word about myself, by the way: I "suffer", if you want to call it that, fromAsperger'sSyndrome. It's considered a form of autism (I disagree). > > > It means that I am rather like a mirror: I reflect reality accurately rather > > than sugar-coating it or editing it for political purposes. > > > Try not to take offense at what I say - one does not take offense at everyday > > reality. Simply reflecting it should not be indictable, IMHO. > > > -- > > David J Dachtera > > dba DJE Systemshttp://www.djesys.com/ > > I agree - Asperger's is NOT a form of Autism - it IS Autism in pure > form, without mental retardation. > > It is an extreme form of male intelligence - hence the capasity for > greatness (academically, technically and artistically). > That's why there's a greater number of men who are born this way: it's > only one step away on evolutionary ladder from a "normal" male. For an > ASutistic woman - it's two steps away from a "normal" female" (that's > why I've had most of my problems in life caused by "normal" females": > they sense "different" in Autistic woman, epsecially the fact that we > do not recognise social female hierarchy and don't take part in gossip > and cattiness - tools of putting other females in "their lace" on > social ladder. So they "gang up on us" meaning to "destroy". Women can > be so much more viscious than men can, because as it currently stands > in modern society, females are still being regarded "second class > citizens" (even though on paper they are not - but reality check, > anyone??? :-) > > And anyone who already feels insecure can be a far worse bully than a > big strong man with muscles and social status to fall back on. It's a > fact!!! > > That's why Autistic females commit suicide! Where the hell to we > belong? Not with bitchy "ordinary" women. And not with men - because > we're NOT men! Of course, one might say we're ALL HUMAN! But it's not > enough, as a person with Asperger's so wants to BELONG - it's the > drive for EVERYTHING we do in life and EVERYTHING we achieve > academically, creatively and politically. > > Oh well, one has to "pay" for ones inborn capacity for brilliance and > as long as human race benefits in the long run.... > > You can hate me for saying it and rush in to try to "put me in my > place" by saying: who does she think she is..... > > Oh I know who I am and I am MERELY STATING FACTS. Nothing else. Nobody > is "better" than anybody else. I may not be better at social graces > and manipulating others like females are, but I may be better at my > own little thing. But that doesn't make me or YOU - the neurotypical > female - BETTER! > > Everybody is unique, everybody is equal!!! Born with nothing and will > die with nothing! > End of! > And yeah, nearly forgot.... > > There's nothing "milder" about AS - TRY LIVING WITH IT, being > compelled to tell the truth, the way it is, all your life dodging the > blows of angry truth-avaiding NeuroTypicals... > LOL :-)))))))))))))))))))))) > > David, go on being yourself and being an accurate mirror of reality. > Someone has to. > > all the best to you and your family. > > Roza > Artistic Autistic, > > www.myspace.com/rozagy- Hide quoted text - > > - Show quoted text - My nephew has Asperger's and he is brilliant in some areas and not so great in other areas. But, I would not trade him, he adds to my life and has a lot to offer the world. No one is perfect (normal), some of us are just imperfect in obvious ways others hide it well but we are all part of the human family. sue ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 06 Jun 2007 23:07:45 +0200 From: Didier Morandi Subject: Re: [OT] 6-JUN-1944 Message-ID: <46672221.2000203@spam.com> Thank you Michel. Time passes. A few years ago, my former Friends from over the Pond used to say Hi. No it comes... from France ! I watched Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan the other day. Amazing difference with the Daryl F. Zanuck's Longest Day version. But it is 44 years later. Still in VMS business, Michel? I posted an ad in 01 Informatique Hebdo beginning of January, just to see. Zero contact... :-( D. --- You like Paint Ball? Discover Airsoft: www.airsoftlabs.fr ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 06 Jun 2007 19:49:47 -0500 From: David J Dachtera Subject: Re: [OT] 6-JUN-1944 Message-ID: <4667562B.9A9B2C61@spam.comcast.net> Didier Morandi wrote: > > Thank you all. My Dad was a WW-II veteran. Had he lived, he'd be 92 this year. We lost him back in Dec. of '93 after a bout with metastic prostate cancer. He'd have appreciated your message, I'm sure. -- David J Dachtera dba DJE Systems http://www.djesys.com/ Unofficial OpenVMS Marketing Home Page http://www.djesys.com/vms/market/ Unofficial Affordable OpenVMS Home Page: http://www.djesys.com/vms/soho/ Unofficial OpenVMS-IA32 Home Page: http://www.djesys.com/vms/ia32/ Unofficial OpenVMS Hobbyist Support Page: http://www.djesys.com/vms/support/ ------------------------------ End of INFO-VAX 2007.309 ************************