[Info-vax] New installment in The OpenVMS Consultant: Shutdowns using STARTUP.COM

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2020-12-28 12:48:45 +0000, Jan-Erik Søderholm said:

> Den 2020-12-28 kl. 09:12, skrev Phillip Helbig (undress to reply):
>> In article <rsbc8v$oiv$1 at dont-email.me>, Simon Clubley 
>> <clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP> writes:
>> 
>>> On 2020-12-27, David Jones <osuvman50 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> The biggest hazard to an orderly shutdown is that you terminal session 
>>>> goes when the network is shut off, leaving your system in a partially 
>>>> shutdown state.
>>>> I changed my shutdown symbol from "@sys$system:shutdown ..." to 
>>>> "$SYSMAN SHUTDOWN NODE /minutes=..." (appending /auto/save as needed).
>>> 
>>> That's another thing that Unix got right big time.
>>> 
>>> I routinely reboot Linux servers from a SSH session to the server and 
>>> never have to worry about this.
>> 
>> I think that at some point that was fixed on VMS.
> 
> What was "fixed" in VMS? I do not remember anything that was fixed that 
> has any bearing on the issues with running SHUTDOWN.COM from an 
> interactive telnet or ssh session. Just do not do that. And it is easy 
> to avoid.

Some of this shutdown "design" did get fixed. Changes related to the 
DECnet terminal session shutdown in antiquity, and later with that 
weirdly-named SYSHUTDWN_0010.COM from VMS831H1I_MANAGE-V0200 ECO and 
later. Prolly a few other places. Some of this still needs work. This 
whole area is messy. q.v. this discussion, among some of the more 
inured OpenVMS users around. This should work, without requiring 
special knowledge or knowledge of magical sequences.

Startups, shutdowns, installations and upgrades and patches, product 
licensing, these are among the longstanding areas of OpenVMS that are 
not shining examples of what is a very expensive product.

These areas should just work. And the fact that ~forty years on, the 
widely-used shutdown procedure is not perceived as working by default?

SYSMAN was an attempt to fix some of these issues, but then SYSMAN 
seemingly hasn't been looked at or integrated with or worked on in 
~twenty years, and little else has adopted or integrated SYSMAN.

Again, these are basic functions of any modern operating system. These 
operating system requests should just work. Without needing to know 
different sequences or workarounds or variants. The default and most 
common tooling should work. And yes, I too use these workarounds.

TL;DR: This is OpenVMS, and we hate new users. "Just do not do that" is 
our mantra.


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