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

[Paul Sture]

On Tue, 13 Mar 2012 21:14:20 -0400, David Froble wrote:

> Joining multiple computers into a cluster is not always a good idea.
> Clusters have their uses.  But non-cluster also has it's uses.
> 
> As for a group of workstations, using one common system disk, and
> ethernet for their cluster interconnect, well, I would call that a "far
> from robust" configuration.  As usual, you're only as strong as your
> weakest link.

There were a couple of other problems here.  When twenty odd workstations 
were trying to reboot, when the network came back they all did it more or 
less at once.  Until I changed the workstations to use Dump Off System 
Disk (DOSD), the server system disk would go into a full shadow merge (or 
was it shadow copy?).  This caused further problems:

a) the boot times were exceptionally long
b) some part of DECnet Phase V could time out and you'd have to reboot 
the workstation later to recover from this

On the plus side, our team never lost any data from this, but I cannot 
speak for the DBAs.



-- 
Paul Sture