[Info-vax] Beyond Open Source

[johnwallace4 at yahoo.co.uk]

On Sunday, 10 May 2015 18:48:53 UTC+1, Stephen Hoffman  wrote:
> On 2015-05-10 17:28:50 +0000, johnwallace4 at yahoo.co.uk said:
[huge snippage for brevity]
> -- 
> Pure Personal Opinion | HoffmanLabs LLC

And how are people supposed to be identifying "the relevant patches",
given the limited information provided with them?

Or are they supposed to take it on trust that everything out of Redmond or 
Cupertino (?) is inherently safe and trustworthy? 

"we should then design the environment to upload and scan the crashes
autonomously, and that we can and should lead the end-users toward the
proper outcome for the issues they're encountering."

Agreed (though we probably mean the end users IT managers ?).

"It's increasingly common for  applications to avoid user-visible
crash logs, but to collect and encrypt and upload that data for analysis."

Agreed again, subject to a few security caveats.

So what would it take (other than some presentation layer stuff :)) to
have VMS combine process dump, system dump (live or post mortem),
error logs, etc and maybe even stuff from DECamds and friends, and
email it off to the authorised service provider.

Maybe the first line service provider needn't even be HP or VSI?

This concept has a distinct 1990s deja vu about it... can't give it a
name though.

It's not going to be top of VSI's priority list, but the infrastructure
for gathering the relevant information is already there, architected in,
generally available, and frequently used constructively if people can
be bothered doing more than "have you tried rebooting it?".

NT ? Infrastructure for gathering information exists, and has done for
some time - NT mailable minidump has been around for ~10 years at least,
event logs since NT came out.

Linux? For gathering, there's syslog, and its kernel equivalent. Or there's
DIY.

There are *lots* of tools for processing the information once it's
been gathered, which are typically inspired from the networky side of
things but can in principle talk to anything which has a compatible
interface. Ones I've seen tend to focus on "event management" rather
than automated symptom/solution stuff.

Automated VMS symptom/solution stuff from a dump? Does that still go
on in the CSCs?

In the case of NT or Linux, it's not always obvious that anything
meaningful is being done with the gathered information. But I'm sure
it helps to have it available. Maybe one day they'll even use it to
fix Flash.