[Info-vax] Long uptime cut short by Hurricane Sandy

[Paul Sture]

In article <kf8cgd$ujt$1 at dont-email.me>,
 Stephen Hoffman <seaohveh at hoffmanlabs.invalid> wrote:

> Feasible?  Sure.  Pain in the rump?  Can be.  Hard to deal with 
> collisions and missing logical names, because somebody hit a ^Y at the 
> wrong moment, procedure crashed out, somebody else defined a logical 
> name in your namespace, because somebody installed a new version of 
> TO.COM that works somewhat differently?  Definitely.

One of my earliest battles with VMS was where another team "borrowed" 
the use of a testing account and lobbed a definition for EDTSYS into the 
login command procedure.  Of course, deleting that logical name didn't 
suffice, because they had also lobbed their own EDTINI.EDT into 
SYS$LOGIN:

>From the help for EDIT/EDT:

---
       $ EDIT/COMMAND=XEDTINI.EDT MEMO.DAT

       If you do not include the /COMMAND=command file qualifier,
       EDT looks for the EDTSYS logical name assignment. If EDTSYS
       is not defined, EDT processes the systemwide startup command
       file SYS$LIBRARY:EDTSYS.EDT. If this file does not exist, EDT
       looks for the EDTINI logical name assignment. If EDTINI is not
       defined, EDT looks for the file named EDTINI.EDT in your default
       directory. If none of these files exists, EDT begins your editing
       session in the default state.

       To prevent EDT from processing either the systemwide startup
       command file or the EDTINI.EDT file in your default directory,
       use the /NOCOMMAND qualifier as follows:

       $ EDIT/NOCOMMAND MEMO.DAT"
---


I wasn't very happy with the decision to put a customised EDTINI.EDT 
into SYS$MANAGER for several versions of VMS either as part of the 
standard distribution.  Fortunately, someone in VMS Engineering 
eventually saw the light and distributed it in .TEMPLATE form instead.

-- 
Paul Sture