[Info-vax] Special deals on Tape Drives

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 3/7/2022 5:05 PM, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
> On 3/7/22 13:57, Simon Clubley wrote:
>> The problem with that is that VMS isn't easy to manage by current
>> standards although it certainly was by the standards of 25 years ago.
> 
> Simon, I pretty much agreed with what you said except for this one part.
> 
> 25 years ago I managed Window, Unix and VMS.  Had a nice VAX Cluster and
> about 100 users. VMS was by far the hardest to manage. I could do Unix
> and even windows with no documentation provided by the vendor.  VMS was
> impossible without The Grey Wall.  And, if you had documentation but
> found it inadequate there was a wealth of third party documentation
> available.   lot of it free.  What was there for VMS?  The Grey Wall.
> 
> I had management tools for Windows and Unix like CFengine.  For VMS,
> I had The Grey Wall.  Do I really need to go on?  Heck, still had
> RSTS running in those days and even it was easier to manage than VMS.
> 
> And, the worst part of it is that nothing has changed other than more
> and maybe better tools and documentation for Windows and Unix.

I must admit that I cannot follow this.

VMS system management is old and it shows.

There are also some odd stuff for historical reasons and
some really poor designed stuff.

But I don't think it is difficult to manage a VMS system.

A one page cheat sheet either in memory for those with VMS
experience or on paper for those without and then use HELP
on commands and inside various utilities for available
options and what they do.

You need to know the names of a handful of startup files.

You need to know how to get into Authorize.

You need to know @SYS$UPDATE:VMSINSTAL and PROD INSTALL.

You need to know @SYS$MANAGER:TCP$CONFIG.

And then one can actually get pretty far.

Of course there are advanced topics: non trivial
cluster configs, non standard hardware etc. but that
tend to be tricky on other OS as well.

It should be feasible to teach any IT admin type
basic VMS system management pretty quickly. The
person will probably not be impressed by what he sees,
but it works. And system management is a mean
to an end not a goal in itself.

Sure VMS does not have the tools to manage thousands or tens
of thousands of systems. But I don't think there are any
customers with that many VMS systems, so the practical
impact is none.

Arne