[Info-vax] grey screen of death

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2015-05-24 14:58:10 +0000, David Froble said:

> Peter 'EPLAN' LANGSTOeGER wrote:
> 
>> btw: Have you run SYS$UPDATE:LIBDECOMP already?
> 
> I do hope VSI does away with this compression.

This particular compression, maybe.

> Distribution media is no longer a problem, and disk space should no 
> longer be a problem.

OpenVMS I64 blew out the DVD distributions a while back, which was part 
of the rationale for PCSI compression.

I'd not expect to see an optical-media upgrade on Itanium due to the 
likely lack of DVD-DL or any of the less-ancient formats in the 
available Itanium hardware configurations, and USB media boot was 
somewhat sketchy in general and particularly sketchy on some of the 
oldest of the Itanium servers.  Now if VSI decides to de-supports the 
oldest servers, or let those folks figure out their own local 
distributions?

Retail quantity-one name-brand prices on 32 GB USB3 flash was US$15 and 
variously less, and figure a couple of dollars ordered direct from the 
producers, but which still costs rather more in aggregate to produce 
than DVD media.  Yes, there are good reasons to go with flash storage 
over DVD, and there are those folks that do need or want and want to 
pay for physical media distributions and that cannot go online for 
whatever reason.

Apple went to fully online media distributions some years back, and 
recent OS X systems ship with and many older systems can be upgraded 
<https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202313> to network boot directly 
from Apple servers over the Internet 
<https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201314>.

Whether VSI and Nemonix decide to implement Internet-remote InfoServer 
boot via EFI as an option on their x86-64 servers?  Probably not.  
(Nice value-add if they did, though.)


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