[Info-vax] Current VMS engineering quality, was: Re: What's VMS up to these

[Keith Parris]

On 3/13/2012 5:31 PM, Michael Kraemer wrote:
> JF Mezei schrieb:
>> This is where the real VMS engineering did shine. They made unpopular
>> decisions (such as forcing a crash, or the much hated RWAST and RWMBX
>> states) because they did spend the time to think about all the
>> implications and saw possibilities where there would be corruption and
>> made damned sure that it wouldn't happen.
>
> In VMS logic there might be more or less good reasons
> for such actions, but at the bottom line it appears as
> committing suicide for fear of death.
> It also leaves the notorious mantra
> "when downtime is no option" a bit dubious, to say the least.

The trade-off here is between availability and cost.

If low cost is the most important, simply raising RECNXINTERVAL would be 
the answer. Systems would simply pause until the network problem was solved.

If availability is more important, then a more-reliable LAN (or more 
reduandant LAN -- VMS clusters have supported multiple redundant LAN 
rails since 7.3-2) would be the answer.