[Info-vax] VSI OpenVMS Hobbyist Program Announced.

[Terry Kennedy]

On Saturday, June 15, 2019 at 5:31:09 AM UTC-4, Jan-Erik Söderholm wrote:
> I have no idea why you had those issues as you show. I use Putty
> SFTP and have been downloading a lot of VSI packages such as the
> Alpha CD container files and 10s of Alpha patches. Never had
> any issues with the SFTP sessions as such.
> 
> I do note that VSI has issued some information about service
> downtime on their FTP services:
> 
>  > The VSI FTP server will be down for 2 software upgrades.
>  > Friday, June 14, 5:00PM Eastern US time – 7:00PM Eastern Time
>  > Saturday June 15,  4:00PM to 6:00PM.
>  > Best Regards,

That seems to have been it, as I can now download the kit. Whatever channel communicated the kit availability to c.o.v and Facebook doesn't seem to have mentioned any downtime.

Hopefully the updated TCP stack that is coming for 9.x can do something like "Service Unavailable" when there is scheduled downtime instead of logging in and dying.

> Apart from that, it works just fine. A little slower than expected
> with the bandwidth available at my side. Took approx 30 min, should
> had been 2-3 min with my bandwidth

Download here took 1 minute and 53 seconds (on a 10GbE backbone connection, but my download ran at 32Mbit/sec). That's par for the course, though, since I've always had a faster link than most of the systems I talk to. If your bandwidth should have given you a much faster download, it is possible that something in the path doesn't deal well with delay (assuming you're downloading from outside the US). Some implementations have specific knowledge to improve FTP performance, which may not be happening with SFTP.

I'm hopeful that we'll see a more full-featured Hobbyist program once the folks at VSI have a chance to study it (presumably after they can catch their breath from the x86 port). Until then, we have the HP program for VAX, Alpha, and Itanium. There's no point in requesting an x86 Hobbyist program until VSI has x86 kits ready to ship for their paying customers. Now, if HP drops their existing Hobbyist program, the urgency of this will increase. But I've not heard any rumors of that happening.