[Info-vax] another HP website fubar

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2015-06-21 23:38:18 +0000, David Froble said:

> The problem I'm having here is a simple one.
> 
> What if the purchaser has no other computer systems?  None.  Zilch.  Nada.

Factory Installed Software (FIS) was (is?) traditionally optional, and 
it required the purchase of a disk with the server.  In years past, the 
recommendation was the purchase of a media kit, though downloading and 
burning an OpenVMS disk image is now feasible from most any computer 
system the end-user has around, with a compatible optical media writer. 
 The need to burn and boot an optical disk image is a little quaint, 
but it usually works.   Generating and booting USB flash drives would 
be nicer than recordable or rewritable optical media, but I'm not 
certain that the USB flash drive boot path is particularly reliable as 
yet.  OpenVMS does not have the ability to download and boot directly 
from the VSI boot servers — think Internet-remote InfoServer, or 
Internet-based vKVM — which would be akin to where some of the more 
advanced vendors are already operating.

This particular case is more of a hassle, as the disk images and 
related materials have moved around and are inaccessible at the 
designated HP URLs.  VSI will eventually have to sort out how they're 
going to handle these references and maybe how they're going to do URL 
continuity, as they rework the existing manuals and implement their web 
site.  But I digress.

> When you're purchasing something like this, shouldn't it come with 
> everything you need?  Like "batteries included"?

Ayup.  I'd expect the default order confirmation process to do that as 
well as verifying that the configuration will work and can be 
supported, but vendors do tend to allow their customers to override 
those checks, and to allow configurations that are more effort for the 
customer.

What happened here and what particular configuration was ordered, I do 
not know.  Though the central gripe here looks to be the lack of URL 
continuity, and not the FIS process.

Where I infer you're (David) going with your reply is sometimes called 
the "out-of-box experience", and — while improvements have been made 
over the years — neither the HP Integrity servers nor OpenVMS have yet 
to fully embrace that philosophy.  Pieces such as FIS and InfoServer 
and vKVM are a good start for single-deployment cases, certainly.   
These single-deployment cases also being a subset of the mass 
deployments and mass management and mass configuration comments I've 
previously made.  These are some of the areas where OpenVMS and the 
current Integrity servers are comparatively weak.  Not that the 
single-deployment cases aren't also comparatively weak, too.  Things'll 
get more interesting if OpenVMS should become fodder for mass 
deployments and mass VM deployments and such — not that recent smaller 
cases such as reconfiguring the networking on ~300 OpenVMS servers is 
at all easy now.


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