[Info-vax] AGEN$INCLUDE_PARAMS

[Phillip Helbig---undress to reply]

1) AGEN$INCLUDE_PARAMS is a useful place to put stuff common to (a
subset of) all nodes booting from a given system disk. 

2) In addition to SYS$SPECIFIC and SYS$COMMON, I also have an area on a
non-system disk for stuff common to all nodes in the cluster, for
example SYSUAF.DAT. 

I would like to put 1) and 2) together.

In the case of normal operation, this shouldn't be a problem.  However,
sometimes I want to boot a node without access to the common non-system
disk, which (I think) might include (automatically) running AUTOGEN.
(This is usually for reboots when applying patches or as part of an OS
upgrade.)  If a file on the common non-system disk isn't accessible, 
then AUTOGEN will issue a warning and continue.  However, this is not 
what I want, since the include file contains some hard-coded values 
which override the AUTOGEN-calculated values.

What I am looking for is something like

SHADOWING=2
FIX_SHADOWING=1

In other words, prefixing any parameter in MODPARAMS.DAT with FIX_ would 
freeze its value until it is overridden in MODPARAMS.DAT (not when 
another value is calculated by AUTOGEN).  The idea is that the 
information as to which parameters are "fixed" would be stored somewhere 
other than in MODPARAMS.DAT, thus in my case preserving their values for 
runs during which the include file is not accessible.

Does anyone else feel a need for this or a similar feature?  Is there 
any way to get this or similar functionality now?

(This might be useful in other contexts as well.  For example, 
FIX_<value> without specifying the value itself could freeze the value 
calculated by this run of AUTOGEN.  One could have an include file 
specifying which values are to be fixed, run AUTOGEN, then make the file 
inaccessible.  Subsequent runs of AUTOGEN would then leave these values, 
whatever they happened to be calculated as, alone.  The idea would be to 
make the file accessible for "real" runs of AUTOGEN and then not have to 
worry when running AUTOGEN while testing something etc (when perhaps 
feedback is not valid, the load is not typical etc).  An alternative to 
this would be some way to tell AUTOGEN to modify ONLY the parameters in 
a file and leave all others alone.  Is there any way to get this 
functionality now?)

Of course, another way to achieve the goal stated at the top of this 
post is to have an include file on the common non-system disk and 
propagate changes to copies of it on all the system disks.  This would 
be easier than incorporating the changes in all individual MODPARAMS.DAT 
files.