[Info-vax] VMS First-Boot on x86 Contest

[Phillip Helbig undress to reply]

In article <p6500p$ilq$1 at dont-email.me>, Stephen Hoffman
<seaohveh at hoffmanlabs.invalid> writes: 

> >> Whatever.  Some of the complexity of a VMS installation involves 
> >> choosing what to install, whether to de-compress stuff, and so on.  
> >> About 20 years ago, I bought a 4-GB disk for f. 500 or whatever.  These 
> >>  days, a disk 100 times as large can be had for about a tenth of the  
> >> price---a factor of 1000.  (And 50 GB costs 99 cents a month in the  
> >> iCloud.)  Hopefully VSI will change things so that a new VMS  
> >> installation installs EVERYTHING.  Disks are cheap.  Really cheap.  If  
> >> necessary, some functionality could be restricted via licensing.
> > 
> > Phillip,
> > 
> > With all due respect, I disagree.
> > 
> > It would be nice to have a complete DVD distribution of all the kits 
> > that could be loaded onto available mass storage.
> > 
> > However, it should not load to the system disk. That just increases the 
> > volume of &*^%%% which must be backed up and restored (setting that 
> > directory tree NOBACKUP is not an option, it leads to too many 
> > operational errors).
> > 
> > Installation by default is also a definite non-starter. I do not want 
> > any products installed on a system that I do not intend to be installed 
> > on that system. Configuration control is a major audit issue.
> > 
> > Having kits online so that intervention is not needed for an install is 
> > a different matter.
> 
> The whole OpenVMS installation and configuration scheme is baroque, so 
> I guess it makes sense to somebody.   

> But seriously, dragging the whole platform back to something as utterly 
> antique as optical disks?  Or continuing with and adding to what is 
> already massive complexity and to the zillions of is-this-installed and 
> we-need-that-go-set-some-parameter and 
> edit-those-configuration-files-to-start-these-dozen-products-and-which-are-part-of-other-server-platform-base-distros-and-remember-to-start-them-in-that-specific-order 
> is even a remotely sane thing to do?    Load it all, configure it all, 
> set up a sane way that the services are started, and provide a way to 
> verify what's installed is as expected, except for {list of files}.  

Hey, Hoff and I agree here, so we must have found the Real Truth at 
last!