[Info-vax] Error installing DECSet

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2018-12-19 22:28:33 +0000, Antonio Duran said:

> On Wednesday, December 19, 2018 at 9:05:03 PM UTC+1, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
>> On 2018-12-19 17:24:07 +0000, Antonio Duran said:
>> 
>>> Totally agree. I went through the whole process to get a legit hobbyist 
>>> license and I got it. Then, I received an E-mail from OpenVMS Customer 
>>> Lab <openvmscustomerlab at hpe.com> containing a link and a username and 
>>> password for downloading the OpenVMS software 
>>> (https://ftp.ext.hpe.com/hprc). I believed that it was a legitimate web 
>>> site but now I doubt it.
>>> Is that a rogue site?
>> 
>> If the HPE site is where you got it, then the folks that created that 
>> media are seemingly either unfamiliar with OpenVMS and its operations, 
>> or something in their tooling and testing went sideways.  If there was 
>> an ISO-9660 step involved somewhere and that truncated the filenames, I 
>> don't know why.  OpenVMS has very old and very limited support for 
>> ISO-9660, and OpenVMS doesn't use that format for its layered product 
>> distros.  (I'm here ignoring the use of dual-format ISO-9660 El Torito 
>> media on OpenVMS I64, as the ISO-9660 El Torito path is not the path 
>> that OpenVMS accesses and loads its layered product software 
>> distribution kits.)
>> 
> I don't know why you are implying that I'm using pirated software. I do 
> have an OpenVMS hobbyist license and I do download the software from 
> the site where the people from HPE directed me to do so. I actually 
> don't mind whether or not you believe me but through the last 30+ years 
> I've made my living developing software, products and services so I do 
> know the value of intelectual property.
> 
> I don't want to put the blame on the guys at HPE or others. The only 
> thing that I truly want is to know what I'm doing wrong. That is, no 
> more no less. Implicitly accusing me of using pirated softeare is not 
> helpful at all.

If those files are representative of the contents of a kit acquired 
from HPE, then somebody at HPE... chose uniquely and somewhat unusually.

(Last hobbyist kits I encountered a while back were zipped disk images 
of the OpenVMS kits, and not individual kit files.)

As for piracy, I'm not intending to imply anything.  Various folks get 
software for OpenVMS from various sources.  Some of those places can be 
sketchy.  I've encountered all manner of passed-around OpenVMS kits 
with passed-around file names over the years, and that approach can 
work just fine, but it's also getting increasingly hazardous.  I'm 
seeing all manner of sketchy kits getting passed around for some other 
platforms, and sketchy kits are an ideal infestation path for OpenVMS 
systems too.   Here, I had assumed—incorrectly, apparently—that the 
folks from HPE would not be generating kits in quite this fashion with 
quite these names.

If anybody that might be creating kits for distribution should be 
reading this, one of the better means to protect OpenVMS RMS files and 
BACKUP savesets and to maintain the correct attributes and the intended 
names and settings is the use of zip "-V".  This can also keep related 
subkits packaged together, when packaging up multi-saveset VMSINSTAL 
kits.



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