[Info-vax] Another VMS-BASIC bug?

[Neil Rieck]

On Tuesday, September 16, 2014 5:17:29 PM UTC-4, David Froble wrote:
 
> This is why HP is NOT a valid maintainer of VMS and all it's parts. 
> 
> They just don't give a damn.  Milk the cow, but don't feed it.
> 
> And this is what VSI will hopefully save us from.

Adding to your frustration with HP, yesterday I had to turn up a new instance of TCPIP 5.7 (the native stack) on OpenVMS-8.4 which was released June-2010. 
 
It was mostly straight forward until I tried to implement SMTP mail. I'm sure most people reading this already know what I am going to type:
 
1) manual "HP TCP/IP Services for OpenVMS Management" has not been updated since 2006 so is mostly useless (SMTP-wise) since 5.7 contains a radically different SMTP implementation.
 
2) the contents of file "tcpip$smtp.conf" are totally different than file "tcpip$smtp_conf.template"
 
3) the release notes say that SMTP defaults anti-SPAM to off when it appears to be defaulted to on (which is why I haven't yet got inbound-mail working; it is rejecting mail from corporate servers on a private intranet; this is the ultimate form of SPAM control - reject all mail)

4) with third-party stacks, I was always able to get inbound SMTP working (even with anti-spam features enabled) by only configuring "resolve". With this beast it looks like I am going to be forced to set up a BIND service.

Now I know why people prefer PSC's Multinet

Anyway, sometime between 2006 and 2010 HP decided to stop updating official VMS documentation so yeah, you are correct, they just don't give a damn. HP, as is is known this side of y2k, is radically different from Hewlett-Packard. No wonder the founding families were so pissed about the merger with Compaq.


Neil Rieck 
Kitchener / Waterloo / Cambridge, 
Ontario, Canada. 
http://www3.sympatico.ca/n.rieck/