[Info-vax] Where to locate software

[Paul Sture]

On 2016-06-13, Bob Koehler <koehler at eisner.nospam.decuserve.org> wrote:
> In article <njf679$64n$1 at dont-email.me>, Stephen Hoffman <seaohveh at hoffmanlabs.invalid> writes:
>> 
>> If by "large", you mean more than a half-dozen or so servers involved, 
>> sure.   OpenVMS servers are installed one at a time.
>
> [...]
>>   Managed one at a time. 
> [...]
>> Startups and shutdowns are edited one at a time.
>
>    Not in the clusters I managed.

FWIW I was writing startup and shutdown procedures in a customer-independent
way back in the 80s, before clustering was generally available.

The RM05 exchangeable disk mount routines, for example, didn't care in
which physical drive a pack was mounted - MOUNT/NOASSIST/NOWRITE/OVERRIDE=ID
was used to find out which pack was where, and then mount it with the
appropriate flavour of MOUNT/SYSTEM.

The rest of the startup and software configuration were driven by the
system name.  Entering that and doing an Autogen were pretty much the
only manual actions required on setting up a new customer or performing
a software upgrade for an existing customer.

OK, these were all part of the same group of customers, running nearly
identical applications software, but it was feasible 30 years ago.

It does take planning of course.

Did I mention naming conventions yet? :-)

-- 
There are two hard things in computer science, and they are cache invalidation,
naming, and off-by-one errors.