[HECnet] OpenVMS on VAXstation 4000/60

[Brian Schenkenberger, VAXman-]

Brian Hechinger <wonko at 4amlunch.net> writes:

On Mon, Oct 07, 2013 at 11:48:10AM +0800, Tim Sneddon wrote:


Alpha I'd go with V8.3 and Itanium, V8.3-1H1.   As Brian pointed out V8,4
was the first release post off-shoring.   The work done for this release was
initiated when ZKO was being shutdown and moved to MRO, which too was
promptly shutdown and moved to India.   As someone who has used and observed
some serious issues with this release (which I believe Brian is too) I
would not recommend it at all.   It is my belief that that the goings on at
HP greatly affected the quality.

I have a friend who is a full time VMS admin and boy let me tell you
about the bitching he did when he did his first 8.4 upgrade. He was not
happy at all. :)

I was part of FT for V8.4.   THis, however, was during the time of the off-
shoring transition and, for the most part, there were few issue that I had
found.   Once the final V8.4 hit the street, hoever, it was chock full with
bugs and issues.   The first issue to concerned me most was broken X11 tun-
neling in ssh.   That pretty much made the general release version of V8.4
usless AFAIWC.   It took many many emails to the new kids on the block until
they were able to understand that ssh X11 tunneling was not the same as a
telnet from a PeeCee WEENDOZE terminal emulator.   Fortunately, there were
still a few, former, ZKOans and MROans retained who evidently helped them
to see the light.

There were several other issues which, eventually, have been address and
V8.4 is now rather stable.   You'll need to get one of the remastered V8.4
distributions which has several patch updates applied to it to use V8.4.

FWIW, not all of the present problems can be attributed to the off-shore
group.   They actually have fixed some bugs that were there for some time.
I uncovered a day-one bug in the INSQ*I and REMQ*I primitives on Itanium
back in May or 2102.   (Described here: http://tmesis.org/?e=43 )   First,
CDC was informed and I provided them with some simple reproducers as well
as my analysis of the Itanium code (detailed in the cited URL).   This was
then forwarded to the India development group.   Clair Grant was still on
the job at that time, however, and I believe he governed over the changes
to fix the problem.

I've met with and spoken with (face to face) a number of the members of 
the India group.   They're all very bright people but I believe they lack
a discipline that can only be had with decades of experience.

-- 
VAXman- A Bored Certified VMS Kernel Mode Hacker       VAXman(at)TMESIS(dot)ORG

Well I speak to machines with the voice of humanity.