[Info-vax] WASD Certificate Management Environment

[IanD]

On Sunday, July 9, 2017 at 5:23:18 PM UTC+10, Jan-Erik Soderholm wrote:
> Hi.
> 
> I do not know much about certificare management, but just saw this
> posted on the WASD mailing list. FWIW.
> 

<snip>

Me neither :-(

I did a quick read and this impressed me...

Quote: "wCME supports both WASD and VMS Apache, either as the only Web service on a system, or with both in use on a single system. Where a system supports both server environments wCME can maintain certificates for either or both. Where a cluster supports one or both with cluster-common configurations only a single system should execute wCME to manage the certificates across the cluster. Where a cluster supports one or both without cluster-common configuration each system should execute wCME. The logical names WCME_CERT and WCME_LOAD support multiple values allowing certificate location and action for each to be managed somewhat independently. Note that any generated certificate will be installed in each specified location whether it is in use from that location or not."

This is what makes WASD 'great' IMO, the Author! Mark is continually probing for ways to make things better and he's expanded the certificate assistance beyond just WASD too

This sort of stuff is what VMS drastically needs. Automated bots to service the PITA things that on VMS always require endless hand holding and manual intervention. Manual intervention = potential mistake point IMO

VMS needs a management framework and a better scripting language than DCL (yes, that old chestnut again). 

While I do like Python for most general tasks, for systems management tasks I'm thinking that a functional language might prove more scalable and robust. 
But what functional language to go for? Erlang is very capable, and has been ported to VMS (although current version is old *sigh* but it's not winning any market-share out there.

Doing some hunting around the rough consensus is that for functional languages, this seems to be the pecking order at the moment...

Scala
Clojure and F#
Erlang and Haskell
OCaml and Common Lisp
Racket

As for WASD, I'm still an advocate for WASD being included with each VMS DVD and a selectable install option

Why leave these environments enhancers for people to stumble across (let's face it, it is stumble across when it comes to finding out what's available on VMS as a platform).

Using WASD to access VMS Help / Documentation leapfrogs the command line access and using it for viewing log files is a bonus, especially when you want to transpose log file data quickly from VMS log files to Windows screens etc

WASD is cluster aware and cluster controllable and comes with a number of tools / enhancements that Mark has added over the years, driven by user demand versus profit seeking

Things like: 
- SoyMail (Gui based VMS mail access)
- INTRUspect (Gui VMS intrusion database monitor)
- Monitors (à la mode system monitor, HyperSPI++, MonDeSi which are similar)
- DCLinabox (A browser-based VT102 Terminal Emulator, uses Websockets)

Go on, click on the below and find out a bit more about what's available, I dare ya!!! ;-)

https://wasd.vsm.com.au/wasd/