[Info-vax] Real Usenet clients, was: Re: backups and compaction or nocompaction might be better

[Phillip Helbig---undress to reply]

In article <kejbgr$l3g$1 at dont-email.me>, Stephen Hoffman
<seaohveh at hoffmanlabs.invalid> writes: 

> Yes, I'm familiar with why you're going through such hassles with the 
> VMS and Alpha gear you're using, too.
> 
> Your general requirements are probably fairly typical of a low-end 
> intermittant-use configuration.  You probably want to get the boxes 
> back online fairly quickly, but you don't necessarily need to have 
> continuous access, 

I like continuous access, to the cluster if not to all the nodes.  I 
like to get a broken node repaired/replaced as quickly as possible and
back into the cluster, but that depends on the problem and how much time 
I have.

> and you're operating with a low budget for hardware, 
> and without a support contract or support staff.  With the pile of gear 
> you have, probably a small or maybe medium business, with either 
> in-house or custom applications.

No, my stuff at home is strictly hobbyist.  (I do use it when I write 
some code or a paper dealing with my old job in astrophysics, but that's 
just a hobby now as well.)

> But I'd expect you're probably willing to accept a way to get your data 
> back on quickly and easily after a disk failure, either with a 
> replacement disk or by rolling that data into a new box.   That HBVS 
> isn't a central requirement.   Imagine, for instance, you could get 
> incremental backups made hourly, and with no added effort on your part, 
> and with an easy restoration path.  Would that be sufficient to avoid 
> the need for HBVS?

It means losing an hour.  I used to do frequent incremental backups to 
tape before I had HBVS (once a day, not once an hour).  Maybe that means 
missing an essential email or whatever.

> The more general requirements then become items such as avoiding data 
> loss, and around outages and potentially continuous uptime.  With 
> uptime, there's also usually some determination of how much an outage 
> can cost.  In your case, outages probably aren't at all costly, barring 
> cases of complete data loss.

Right, the loss is not in money but in my nerves.

> Can VMS be used here?  Sure.  But if you didn't have those free 
> licenses and if you didn't have the time necessary to keep this stuff 
> going, you probably wouldn't choose VMS.

My main reason for choosing VMS is neither the hardware nor the
management, but rather VMS itself.  The fact that hobbyist licenses are 
available and old hardware can be found cheap/free makes it viable.