[Info-vax] Upgrade to 8.4

[Paul Sture]

In article <ec4fa141-ccfa-4594-afd5-52d00ea99f7c at googlegroups.com>,
 issinoho <iain at issinoho.com> wrote:

> Any other gotchas to be aware of?

One often forgotten area is MODPARAMS.DAT.

VMS upgrade procedures typically run AUTOGEN with the UPGRADE parameter, 
and this saves what AUTOGEN considers to be important parameters, 
appending them to a new version of MODPARAMS.DAT.

There are two problems with this:

1. New values will be hardcoded and won't be kept together with
   the original comments (you do comment this file, don't you? :-))
   Also constructs such as

        SCSSYSTEMID=(2*1024)+21

   will be overridden by a later statement such as

         SCSSYSTEMID=2069

2. Unless you revise this file it will contain multiple entries for
   the values AUTOGEN preserves.  Unless you are aware of this
   behaviour it is all too easy to end up thinking you have changed
   a parameter's value, but there's a duplicate entry waiting further
   down the file which will override your change.

In conclusion, add the task of revising your MODPARAMS.DAT file for each 
node involved to your post-installation task list.

-- 
Paul Sture

IBM's Thomas J. Watson predicted a "world market for maybe five computers".
Given the way this whole Cloud thing is going, he might have been extremely
prescient.