[Info-vax] InfoServer 150

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2019-01-29 01:39:08 +0000, Mark DeArman said:

> Yes, I believe the issue here is that the infoserver.zip was made with 
> the VMS attribs striped so it would work on DOS. It extracts fine on 
> Windows, which is normally a no-go.  Should have thought of this 
> earlier.

According to unzip -Zv command on macOS, I did remember to use zip -V 
when creating this particular zip, so the file attributes have been 
preserved.  The presence of the PKWARE VMS stuff in the unzip -Zv 
output means that zip -V was used.

That VTX/VXT in the abstract is probably my typo, too.

As for the extracted files, these are block / binary files, so they'll 
extract and burn just fine on most any platforms, and using tools that 
can perform raw burns.

The version of unzip that Bill is running is very old, known to have 
various bugs and has security issues.  It's ancient.  Anything prior to 
unzip 6.0 is badly outdated, and lacks 2 GB support.   unzip 6.0 has 
some known bugs and some minor security bugs, too.  Writing parsers for 
untrusted input is not easy.   Parsers for ASN.1 and otherwise have had 
flaws, for that matter.  Sandboxes or separate processes are some of 
the approaches for isolation.  But I digress.

> Seem to recall there was something about 512 vs 2048 CDDrives booting 
> on VAX too, but I don't recall how/if that was an issue with burning 
> them.

OpenVMS expects 512-byte optical drives on OpenVMS VAX, and VAX lacks 
IDE/ATA, SATA, and USB support.  OpenVMS Alpha and OpenVMS I64 include 
512-byte support for SCSI, and 2048-byte support for IDE/ATA and SATA 
and USB optical devices.  Writing optical media on OpenVMS is always 
2048-byte sectors, and uses one of various integrated or add-on tools.  
 As for recording the files on OpenVMS and other platforms, the 
commands and the tools that I and others have cited do work.

I spent quite a bit of time getting COPY/RECORDABLE_MEDIA available and 
with generating disks using ported cdrtools on OpenVMS, in addition to 
doing various CD images and kitting-related activities.  I had more 
than a few of these optical-media-related discussions with folks over 
the years too, and it was sometimes easier to send some of the folks a 
disk than it was to pry them away from their assumptions and their 
preferred and sometimes non-working tools.

Lacking details on the recording commands used, and lacking information 
on whether a record and a rip shows any differences, nor the InfoServer 
boot commands used, and other details.... Which makes these discussion 
threads longer, too.

And optical media and optical media drives can be...  funky.  I had a 
drive from a very well known brand utterly fail basic recording 
operations.  There was a two-byte slip in recorded data, in a 
seemingly-random range of sectors well along in the recording.  The 
correct data was written (instrumented the driver), and the drive just 
botched the recording process.

Now as for what's actually in those zipped disk images?  Donno.  
Host-based InfoServer replaced hardware-based InfoServer a long time 
ago.


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