[Info-vax] Pathworks or one of its descendants on x86

[terry-groups at glaver.org]

On Tuesday, February 20, 2018 at 2:33:47 AM UTC-5, Andrew Brehm wrote:
> Does anyone know anything about the availability, next year or so, of Pathworks or its descendants on OpenVMS x86?

Which component, specifically? If you're referring to SMB / NETBIOS file sharing, SAMBA would probably be your best bet. The overhead of VMS on x86 is unknown at this point, but if it is anything like VMS-vs-Unix on VAX and Alpha it will probably make this an inefficient choice for anything other than accessing files that must reside on the VMS system. Performance would be much better using either a Linux or Unix-like server with SAMBA or a Windows system with native SMB.

The last time I looked at it in detail (back in the VAX days), PATHWORKS was an unholy mix of HP / 3Com TCP/IP networking stuff plus modified versions of Microsoft networking code that originated in Windows for Workgroups + WIN32S. I gave up and NFS exported the VMS disks via Multinet to an x86 Unix-like system and then served them to the client PCs via SAMBA. Even that double indirection was faster than PATHWORKS.