INFO-VAX Fri, 02 Nov 2007 Volume 2007 : Issue 599 Contents: Re: 9-Track tapes on integrity DCL Symmetry WAS: DCL command - No system messages at times Re: Happy Anniversary VMS - 30 years young Re: Happy Anniversary VMS - 30 years young Re: Happy Anniversary VMS - 30 years young Re: Happy Anniversary VMS - 30 years young Re: Happy Anniversary VMS - 30 years young Re: Happy Anniversary VMS - 30 years young Re: Happy Anniversary VMS - 30 years young Re: Happy Anniversary VMS - 30 years young Re: Happy Anniversary VMS - 30 years young hope there's VMS here Re: hope there's VMS here Re: hope there's VMS here Re: Revisited: Wireless (WPA) authentication and OpenVMS Re: Using USB storage ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 01 Nov 2007 21:10:24 +0100 From: Wilm Boerhout Subject: Re: 9-Track tapes on integrity Message-ID: <472a32c9$0$13746$ba620dc5@text.nova.planet.nl> on 31-10-2007 22:54 Ron Johnson wrote... [snip] > But they'll notice the PO for the DL360. Yes, but that a *Windows* server, that must be OK Shirley :-) /Wilm ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 01 Nov 2007 18:25:40 -0700 From: "Tom Linden" Subject: DCL Symmetry WAS: DCL command - No system messages at times Message-ID: On Thu, 01 Nov 2007 09:23:29 -0700, Ken Robinson wrote: > On 11/1/07, Jan-Erik Söderholm wrote: >> Chuck Aaron wrote: >> > On my Alph servers running VMS 8.3 at times (not all the time) >> > if I enter in a DCL command like for example: >> > >> > SHOW INTRUSION/TYPE=ALL >> > and there are no intrusions I normally get the message: >> > >> > %SHOW-F-NOINTRUDERS, no intrusion records match specification >> > >> > However, frequently I get no message at all. >> > >> >> Have you executed any command file that disables messages ? >> > > What does > > $ write sys$output f$env("message") > > show? > > This will tell you what settings VMS thinks are set for the > > $ set message > > command > > If it says something like > > /notext/noid/noseverity/nofacility > > do a > > $ set mess/text/id/severity/facility It has often struck me as odd that there is not symmetry (at least where it makes sense) between SET and SHOW. If I had written DCL it would. Of course, had I written it, it would look like Rexx:-) > > to get the messages back, then figure out why they were turned off. > > Ken -- PL/I for OpenVMS www.kednos.com ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 01 Nov 2007 14:54:19 -0600 From: Keith Parris Subject: Re: Happy Anniversary VMS - 30 years young Message-ID: david20@alpha2.mdx.ac.uk wrote: > VAX -> Alpha was seen as producing improved performance. > Alpha -> Itanium is seen as a forced move where continued Alpha development > would have produced better performance. There are many more factors in today's computing world than raw performance -- like price/performance, for one. Many customers upgrading from Alpha to Itanium today are telling us they are getting twice the performance for half the price. That's a 4X improvement in price/performance as a reward for moving. And moving across from Alpha to Itanium is much easier than VAX to Alpha was. ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 01 Nov 2007 14:57:27 -0600 From: Keith Parris Subject: Re: Happy Anniversary VMS - 30 years young Message-ID: John Smith wrote: > HP may well become Itanic's only customer, which puts it in the same boat as > Alpha was in. Alpha lost Windows support, and with it the associated volumes and economies of scale. Itanium runs Windows, Linux, HP-UX and other UNIX flavors, OpenVMS, and NonStop, and benefits from the volumes of all those platforms. And OpenVMS customers benefit from the lower hardware costs that volume allows. ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 01 Nov 2007 15:00:25 -0600 From: Keith Parris Subject: Re: Happy Anniversary VMS - 30 years young Message-ID: JF Mezei wrote: > The main reason that IA64 failed commercially is that it isn't > compatible with windows, Don't tell that to our many customers running Windows on Superdomes -- they might be very disappointed to find what they're doing is impossible. When you can't scale-out with clusters like you can with OpenVMS, sometimes the only solution is to scale-up, within a box, hence Windows on Superdome. ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 01 Nov 2007 17:44:34 -0500 From: Ron Johnson Subject: Re: Happy Anniversary VMS - 30 years young Message-ID: On 11/01/07 15:57, Keith Parris wrote: > John Smith wrote: >> HP may well become Itanic's only customer, which puts it in the same >> boat as >> Alpha was in. > > Alpha lost Windows support, and with it the associated volumes and > economies of scale. > > Itanium runs Windows, Linux, HP-UX and other UNIX flavors, OpenVMS, and > NonStop, and benefits from the volumes of all those platforms. And > OpenVMS customers benefit from the lower hardware costs that volume allows. But -- compared to how many Opterons are sold each week, or Xeons sold every day -- how many Itania (plural of Itanium?) are sold each QUARTER? -- 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, 01 Nov 2007 17:46:51 -0500 From: Ron Johnson Subject: Re: Happy Anniversary VMS - 30 years young Message-ID: On 11/01/07 16:00, Keith Parris wrote: > JF Mezei wrote: >> The main reason that IA64 failed commercially is that it isn't >> compatible with windows, > > Don't tell that to our many customers running Windows on Superdomes -- The very thought of Windows on Real Hardware just makes me ill. > they might be very disappointed to find what they're doing is impossible. > > When you can't scale-out with clusters like you can with OpenVMS, > sometimes the only solution is to scale-up, within a box, hence Windows > on Superdome. -- 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, 01 Nov 2007 20:43:41 -0400 From: JF Mezei Subject: Re: Happy Anniversary VMS - 30 years young Message-ID: <20123$472a72c2$cef8887a$7966@TEKSAVVY.COM> Keith Parris wrote: > Don't tell that to our many customers running Windows on Superdomes -- > they might be very disappointed to find what they're doing is impossible. You're allowed to think what you want. Yes, there is still some old version of Windows with very limited amount of software that runs on that IA64 contraption. But that is a far cry from IA64 claiming "imdustry standard" or "high volume" status. In terms of costs, if HP had wanted to build Alpha systems at low cost, they could have. They simply elected to keep older designs. And they artificially placed a price difference between Alpha and those IA64 things to help force customers choose the unwanted IA46 over the more popular Alpha. Similarly, they changed VMS licensing to make it more affordable for some, but only for IA64, not for the other platfoms. ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 01 Nov 2007 20:24:24 -0500 From: Ron Johnson Subject: Re: Happy Anniversary VMS - 30 years young Message-ID: On 11/01/07 19:43, JF Mezei wrote: > Keith Parris wrote: >> Don't tell that to our many customers running Windows on Superdomes -- >> they might be very disappointed to find what they're doing is impossible. > > You're allowed to think what you want. Yes, there is still some old > version of Windows with very limited amount of software that runs on > that IA64 contraption. You might know a lot about VMS, but you apparently know squat about Windows. All of the current versions of the "big" Server software (Windows, Exchange & SQL Server) are all released for ia64. And ia64 is a VC builds target, so in-house development obviously goes on. > But that is a far cry from IA64 claiming "imdustry standard" or "high > volume" status. > > In terms of costs, if HP had wanted to build Alpha systems at low cost, > they could have. They simply elected to keep older designs. And they > artificially placed a price difference between Alpha and those IA64 > things to help force customers choose the unwanted IA46 over the more > popular Alpha. Similarly, they changed VMS licensing to make it more > affordable for some, but only for IA64, not for the other platfoms. -- 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: Fri, 2 Nov 2007 01:42:06 -0000 From: "John Wallace" Subject: Re: Happy Anniversary VMS - 30 years young Message-ID: <13il03hfgfnhaf1@corp.supernews.com> "Jan-Erik Söderholm" wrote in message news:3vNVi.12580$ZA.8128@newsb.telia.net... > JF Mezei wrote: > > > The main reason that IA64 failed commercially... > > Did it ? > Or do you want it to ? Are your eyes closed, or is the content of JF's message just too uncomfortable for you? Of course IA64 has failed commercially to achieve its stated primary goal, the one which was used as an excuse to kill Alpha in its favour. The goal stated by Intel and HP was that IA64 was going to be the "industry standard" 64 bit architecture (e.g. volume dominant, most affordable, best supported, etc). IA64 is not volume dominant, it is not most affordable, it is not best supported in terms of choice of applications - it has failed in all of those, AMD64 has won hands down in all of those, and AMD64 is likely to stay successful for longer than IA64 is likely to be around. The vast majority of folks buying IA64 are folks who are already heavily committed to stuff which only comes from HP, folks who have no realistic alternative, folks who are committed to NonStop, HPUX, and VMS. Those folks are largely not interested in IA64 as such, they are interested in the software and system benefits which VMS etc bring to their businesses. IA64 just happens to be HP's required silicon for the time being. What features and benefits does IA64 silicon bring to the table for these folk? Are any of them things which a true "industry standard" chip choice couldn't also deliver? Those who have the choice of something other than IA64 pretty much all choose to look elsewhere these days, and that is not likely to change. HPTC is one of the few exceptions where Itanium has a few wins, and you have to ask how much Intel marketing funding is used to tilt the playing field here (as is common practice with Intel). Can IA64 really be a viable medium term business for Intel and/or HP, when it is apparently in the same no-USP, non-competitive-product "death spiral" which Alpha was allegedly going down? Anyway, once the Common System Interconnect Itaniums come out, you'll be able to plug a true "industry standard" 64bit CPU (y'know, the AMD64 ones) into an Itanium socket in an Itanium system and it'll work just fine, once the software's been ported, and it'll magically have all the same "system level" reliability features as an Itanium would, and superb system-level performance, not to mention a better choice of software than Itanium, won't it? Where does that leave IA64, where does it leave HP's Itanium-centric system designers? Wrt Unisys: er, afaict Itanium's on the way out. Unisys's "mainframe class" kit now offers Xeon-based systems, not just IA64 (eg as reported http://www.unisys.com/about__unisys/news_a_events/05158777.htm). Some bloke called Rich Marcello took charge of Unisys's enterprise server and software business earlier this year, does he know anything about the enterprise market, is he likely to know anything about whether customers who have a free choice would prefer their hardware to be IA64 or AMD64? "OpenVMS customers benefit from the lower hardware costs that volume allows." If one accepts that is the case, then surely it follows that OpenVMS on mid/high-end Proliant-class boxes can do the "economies of scale" thing even better, *unless* there is some technical uniqueness which only Itanium brings to the OpenVMS table, or *unless* there is some other consideration not yet mentioned. No one's found me a significant technical uniqueness yet except maybe some of the aforementioned niche HPTC stuff, which isn't VMS territory anyway. Therefore one might imagine that OpenVMS on mid/high-end AMD64 Proliant would deliver the kind of hardware availability that keeps 98% of the server market happy today at the same hardware prices they're paying today, and maybe for a little extra in terms of OS cost to buy (and initial cost to learn) OpenVMS could provide software stability those customers can only dream about today, with TCO's they can also only dream about ("fit and forget" operations and no "Windows DataCentre" maintenance costs), and sales volumes (and profits) for the VMS vendor that Marcello etc could only ever dream about too. So why doesn't it happen? I can't help wondering if maybe actually marketing OpenVMS on non-niche hardware might risk seriously upsetting Microsoft, and HP HQ wouldn't want that to happen would they? Redmond might tolerate HP doing a bit of background stuff with Linux, NonStop is too niche for Redmond to worry about, but HP actively marketing an HP-owned credible server OS on non-niche hardware, to potentially compete with some aspects of Windows Server high end, might not go down well in Redmond, and that could be bad news for HP in general - not just systems, but services too, are dependent on Microsoft-related revenues. Will Microsoft still be around 30 years after the launch of Windows? What state will Windows be in? 2p John Wallace ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 02 Nov 2007 00:08:55 -0400 From: JF Mezei Subject: Re: Happy Anniversary VMS - 30 years young Message-ID: Ron Johnson wrote: > All of the current versions of the "big" Server software (Windows, > Exchange & SQL Server) are all released for ia64. And ia64 is a VC > builds target, so in-house development obviously goes on. Unless Microsoft has reversed its previous decision, its support of IA64 is still very limited with only a few "server" packages available, and nothing like Office or others popular software. And if I remember correctly, Ia64 versions were to come later than for the industry high volume stuff. And frankly, do you serously believe that someone with pure business goals would choose to run windows on some IA64 box ? I can understand shops who have marketing associations with either intel or microsoft who would deploy some windows on ia64. I can understand some very high profile high performance shop getting some deal where the subsidies for having windows on IA64 would be greater than running linux on 8086 for instance. But do people really want windows on IA64 on their own free will ? ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 01 Nov 2007 23:50:32 GMT From: VAXman- @SendSpamHere.ORG Subject: hope there's VMS here Message-ID: I don't want to die from M$! ...from a hospital bed (gotta love EVDO)... -- VAXman- A Bored Certified VMS Kernel Mode Hacker VAXman(at)TMESIS(dot)COM "Well my son, life is like a beanstalk, isn't it?" http://tmesis.com/drat.html ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 01 Nov 2007 19:30:15 -0500 From: Ron Johnson Subject: Re: hope there's VMS here Message-ID: On 11/01/07 18:50, VAXman- @SendSpamHere.ORG wrote: > I don't want to die from M$! > > ...from a hospital bed (gotta love EVDO)... Hope you feel well soon. -- 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, 01 Nov 2007 20:52:19 -0400 From: JF Mezei Subject: Re: hope there's VMS here Message-ID: <74a93$472a74c7$cef8887a$9631@TEKSAVVY.COM> VAXman- @SendSpamHere.ORG wrote: > I don't want to die from M$! > > ...from a hospital bed (gotta love EVDO)... Best wishes for a quick recovery. Do they have Philips or Agilent health monitors ones where you are ? Philips has made huge inroads in medical systems at the expense of what used to be HP (now agilent). These monitors are petty fancy, complete with ethernet for interconnection etc etc. Full functionality is seen in an ICU situation where interconnected monitors in each room/bed talk to each other and exchange alarms along with a central monitor at the nurse desk. ------------------------------ Date: 2 Nov 2007 01:25:22 GMT From: DAVISM@ecr6.ohio-state.edu (Michael T. Davis) Subject: Re: Revisited: Wireless (WPA) authentication and OpenVMS Message-ID: In article <1193845820.877204.203040@22g2000hsm.googlegroups.com>, IanMiller writes: >Do you mean this RADIUS server ? > >http://starlet.deltatel.ru/radiusvms/ > Yes, that's the one I had in mind. Ultimately, though, I'm just after authentication against OVMS from WiFi access points that utilize WPA. Whatever the solution, it can't involve Linux/UNIX (including Mac OS X), but can involve use of Windows, if necessary. An OVMS "native" solution would be ideal. Regards, Mike -- | Systems Specialist: CBE,MSE Michael T. Davis (Mike) | Departmental Networking/Computing http://www.ecr6.ohio-state.edu/~davism/ | The Ohio State University | 197 Watts, (614) 292-6928 ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 1 Nov 2007 22:40:19 +0000 (UTC) From: moroney@world.std.spaamtrap.com (Michael Moroney) Subject: Re: Using USB storage Message-ID: Somewhat related: What exactly is in the "partition table" when you $ INITIALIZE/GPT a disk? (used for Itanic system disks to fool the boot firmware that it's a partitioned disk, not an unpartitioned VMS disk)? I ask this because I have a VMS-formatted thumb drive, and I recently had a need for a thumb drive to transfer files from a PC. I was already using the thumb drive for VMS files for an Itanic and couldn't use it for the PC. Later I got to thinking "wouldn't it be cool" if the thumb drive was initted/GPT and tinkered with, so there was a VMS "partition" and a Windoze partition. You could mount a 2GB thumbdrive on VMS and use the 1GB VMS area and Windoze would recognize its separate 1GB area if inserted into a Windoze system, for example. Each OS would know not to touch the other's area. (presumably the VMS part would appear to be in a separate partition to Windows, and the Windows stuff might be in a 1GB DONTTOUCH.DAT container file to VMS or something) I plugged the $INIT/GPT thumbdrive into a PC and looked at it with some partition software, and it didn't understand it. I know that VMS creates a [000000]GPT.SYS which occupies the first and last N blocks of the drive and the partition stuff is in there. ------------------------------ End of INFO-VAX 2007.599 ************************