[Info-vax] devops / source control - (Was: Where to locate software)

[John E. Malmberg]

On 6/12/2016 9:09 AM, Kerry Main wrote:
>
> Perhaps  look at some small company like Facebook and see what they
> have chosen and the reasons why: VCS is Mercurial - a centralized VCS:
> https://code.facebook.com/posts/218678814984400/scaling-mercurial-at-facebook/

Actually mercurial is a dvcs.  It has a lot in common with git.

Back in the 90's I managed VMS farms in the small 3 digit range.

I used DEC CMS, and a (possibly slightly modified) TELL decnet object.

None of the commercial DEC or third party distributed management systems 
were used.

One reason was the effort to get approval for spending the money for 
purchase.

The other is that most of them made incorrect assumptions on how the 
nodes needed to be managed.  Many of them had fancy GUIs, but did not 
allow me to efficiently manage things across a variety of systems.

Some required a Windows workstation for the GUI.

Many required higher minimum versions of VMS than I needed.

Some required private copy of Java for each node in a cluster for no 
reason at all.  My system disks did not have room for that nonsense, and 
if a VMS management tool developer can not get something that simple 
correct, then I definitely would not trust the product.

And some of them had obscene licensing costs for what they actually did.

So I used DCL scripts with a naming convention of "_node" or "_cluster" 
if they were node/cluster specific and used DECNET to keep them in sync 
with the tested reference CMS copy.

While the systems had at least 10 major variants in how they were set 
up, the stuff that was common for all systems was common.

The last part implemented was using Advanced Server to pull the 
Windows/NT 4.0 user and group list and use it to update the VMS SYSUAF, 
which eliminated manually adding/disabling the few local VMS DCL users.

That allowed a home brew external authentication using VMS 5.5-2, which 
due to some device driver constraints, about 1/3 of my systems had to use.

With this setup, I could have easily scaled it much higher.

Provisioning a node was done by installing the OS, layered products and 
then decnet installing the script package.

But that was then...

Regards,
-John
wb8tyw at qsl.net_work