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

[Phillip Helbig undress to reply]

In article <na4s9b$2cc$1 at dont-email.me>, Stephen Hoffman
<seaohveh at hoffmanlabs.invalid> writes: 

> 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.

I have to agree with Hoff here.  To me, the big advantage of a cluster 
is to have the possibility to use common files such as SYSUAF and so on. 
The logical names for this are documented.  Accounding and the audit 
server are similar but somewhat different.  Then  there is TCPIP stuff.
I thought I had that down pat, then I discovered that SSH has its own 
default disk and directory, which are by default on the system disk.

The basic problem here is that the original design was for a boot server
and some satellites.  At least that is how it appears to me.  So,
SYS$COMMON is stuff common to all the nodes.  So far, so good.  But add 
a second system disk and in SYS$COMMON you have stuff common to all 
nodes booting from that disk and the VMS stuff which is the same on all 
system disks in the world with that version of VMS.  So, it is used for 
two different purposes.  One wants the ability to have separate VMS 
installations, for redundancy, for rolling upgrades, and so on.  But 
usually one wants SYSUAF and so on the same on all nodes.  So, move it 
off the system disk.  Supported, yes; documented, yes.  But it has to be 
done by hand.  Then the other stuff mentioned above.

Once such a disk is customized, one can't just do a fresh install 
without re-customizing it.  If one has documented what one has done, OK, 
but that is extra work, and new stuff has to be folded in as it comes 
in.

One really needs a search list which would be SYS$SPECIFIC, then some
cluster-common area, the SYS$COMMON.  A bit strange since the first and
third are on the same disk, but there you go.  I think redefining
SYS$SYSROOT like this is probably not supported.  If this worked, then
one just has to put the common stuff on the non-system disk and it will
be found automatically.  There could be a special file which contains 
one line, the definition of a logical to point to this disk.  This is 
then the only thing which would need changing after a completely fresh 
install.  There is something attractive about upgrading the system disk 
and being able to see the history etc, but if something doesn't work, 
probably the only way one could expect help would be to do a fresh 
install.

I recently bought an iPad Pro, primarily because it is very close to A4
size and hence well suited to displaying stuff designed to be printed on
A4 paper, so it's a practical mobile PDF reader.  It's also useful to
have mobile internet these days, for various reasons.  I just had an OS
upgrade, which took just a few minutes.  :-)  I don't think that VMS
should go this far, but some design improvement would be nice.  (On the
other hand, I noticed that my DECterm was not very responsive.  I then
turned off the WLAN on the iPad and now things are back to normal.  :-(
There was nothing running on the iPad, but apparently it does a lot of
stuff in the background.  The iPad talks to an access point I bought
today which goes to the same LAN the VMS cluster is on, then to a
17.7/1.2 Mb/s ADSL connection.  (I'll probably upgrade to 50/10 or
something in the next few days---not because of the iPad; I've had it on
the list of things to do for a while.)  I bought a new access point 
since when configuring the iPad it connected to the internet without 
asking for a WiFi password.  I had bought an access point about 5 years 
ago for my wife's iPad 2, which had worked fine.  Why it was open for 
all I don't know.  It's static IP address had also changed.  I managed 
to reconfigure it from scratch with an installation CD, set things up 
like it was before (static IP address, custom password, MAC filtering, 
strong encryption, management access only over LAN---the works) and an 
hour or two later it was back to the open configuration.  Then I 
reconfigured it again from scratch, did a firmware upgrade, and things 
worked properly, but after another couple of hours it had reverted to 
being insecure and I couldn't reconfigure it with the installation CD.
So either a bug (the most recent firmware was from 2011, which came out 
just after I had bought it; it had 2008 firmware on it) or someone had
hacked into it.  So, I decided a newer model, which will be supported 
for a while, was probably a better idea.)  What VMS should do is clean 
things up, but not break existing installations.

Sound impossible?  Not really.  Things CAN be set up properly now; it's
just a lot of work, and with each new version of VMS one has to review
one's setup.  It would be nice to have a standard procedure which does
all the necessary definitions, so all one needs to do is tell it the
name of the disk where the off-the-system-disk stuff is to reside. This
would make it easier for folks to do a rolling change from their custom
job to the new standard.  After a couple of years, when everyone could
be using this, VSI could change things under the hood and we wouldn't
have to care about the details anymore, since it would just work out of
the box. 

But this should be a longer-term goal.  The main goal now is VMS on x86, 
and it would be best to do that and leave everything else as it is, then 
move on to the next topic, and so on.  Changing more than one thing at 
once makes debugging hard.