[Info-vax] HP Integrity rx2800 i4 (2.53GHz/32.0MB) :: PAKs won't load

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2016-02-18 15:56:14 +0000,   VAXman-  @SendSpamHere.ORG said:

> In article <2fdfa0cd-4734-4163-b8cb-9fd7a903c193 at googlegroups.com>, 
> dgordonatvsi at gmail.com writes:
>> No. To be fair, you first had an operational problem (non-identical 
>> license databases) and once that was fixed that, you hit the LOGINOUT 
>> bug.  Unfortunately, they give similar (but not identical) error 
>> messages.
> 
> I don't recall how the customer had the databases.  I was asked to look 
> into the loginout issue.  After muching with the licenses for days, I 
> got into the situation I first posted.  The VAXCLUSTER login error 
> caused many regrets and a lot of my time.

To be fair, it's a pair of OpenVMS bugs.   Or maybe more.    This is 
all part of a bad and user-hostile design of clustering, poor and 
complex and scatter-shot documentation, and — clearly for this, and for 
various other cases — bad error handling and poor error messages.

The whole clustering UI is problematic.    At best.    It really needs 
to be reviewed for requirements, nuked from orbit, and a replacement 
rolled forward to current capabilities (e.g. LDAP).    That's likely 
not happening any time soon, unfortunately.

Ponder this, VSI folks...   Brian is experienced with OpenVMS.   Very 
experienced.    When the most experienced users are getting bagged by 
these cases, maybe there are problems, and maybe there is room for 
improvement?

Forming a multiple system disk cluster needs to shuffle ~25 files 
(OpenVMS and IP, plus any ancillary cluster-aware data) and to ensure 
that the contents and records and security are all synchronized across 
all member hosts, and — to be compliant with the supported 
configurations — I now have to shuffle those ~25 files back to the 
system disks for any patches and upgrades, and then review and relocate 
and resynchronize the results.

This mess is not a user interface.  This is not a design.   This is a 
25-file pile of short-term and expedient and incremental hackery, 
handing the resulting mess to the system managers and the support teams 
to deal with.


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