Re: Results of my straw poll.

Bill Gunshannon wrote:
In article <e4jo6k01hvj@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
healyzh@xxxxxxxxxxx writes:

Tom Linden <tom@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Thu, 18 May 2006 18:48:41 -0700, Bill Gunshannon <bill@xxxxxxxxxxx>


What did any of that have to do with the fact that I don't have the
hardware to waste (and wouldn't waste it if I did) on a piddling task
like serving up documentation? When you spend as much effort as I
have to doing so much with so little you tend to get very frugal.

I sort of agree in this case (even though I do serve up multiple sets of the
doc's on my VMS server). At the same time, other than disk space would it
really be a problem, it wouldn't put much of a load on the server, and it would save electricity.


Do you really thin the 70-100 watts the PC draws would even be a blip on
the radar in a computer room with VAX 7000 and PDP-11.44's in it? Not
to mention the rest of the stuff here on campus.


Any Alpha (except maybe a fully loaded GS128 or Alpha 7000) is going
to use less electricity than your VAX 7000 or PDP-11/44's. Much less.


The real advantage to serving it up on VMS is you can serve up Bookreader format doc's.


The last Docset I got had two sets. One was bookreader and the other was
HTML. My students can read the HTML with any web browser. The bookreader
format would only be accessible from a (very) small subset of machines
here on campus

This small subset consisting of all Macs, all Linux systems, probably
all other Unixy systems (i.e. anything that comes with an X server),
and any Windows PC with an X server, which I think but am not certain
there are freeware versions available. Just run bookreader on the VMS
(client) system and direct the display to their X server.

Plus, remember my saying I was going to put 7 CD drives
on the box? It's not just VMS documentation I need to serve.


Who says you need 7 CD drives for the VMS docs? You don't need any.
Just copy them to the hard drive(s). You can probably put each CD in
a separate subdirectory and it will work fine. You can definitely
use LD (freeware) to create a bunch of virtual disks and put each
VMS doc CD on a separate LD drive and serve those.


OTOH, I think the suggestion that you point the students at
http://www.hp.com/go/vms/docs makes more sense than setting up your own
server to do it. I'm have the doc's on my server so I can quickly access
them, plus they're older, and a bunch are in bookreader format.


Network traffic, network outages, network latency. And that's just the
disadvantages that come immediately to mind. Because I have to serve
other docs as well, it doesn't make much sense to make them go all the
way to hp.com for some of them when I have them all right here.

Good reason for serving them locally, but it is just as cheap and easy
to serve them from a VMS system as a Unix or PC system.



I have a bunch of 4 and 9 GB drives you are welcome to and will be freeing
up as many as 24 18 GB soon, to which you are welcome. They are 80 pin
scsi.

I would think old decommishioned Unix hardware, or even decommisioned PC servers might be a good source of drives.


Not SCSI. We haven't used SCSI here for a long time. Too expensive.
And contrary to popular belief, IDE is just as reliable. In most cases
the only difference between SCSI and IDE is the controller mounted on
the drive. The actual drive works are exactly the same.


This points at an Itanium or recent Alpha that works (well) with IDE.
I think most IDE drives will work with most any Alpha that is new enough
to have an IDE controller, but on the older systems, disk performance
is "bad". The controller was there as a cheap way to hook up a CDROM
drive for software installs, firmware upgrades, etc. and performance
wasn't regarded as critical. However, "bad" is a matter of perception,
it might have been bad in comparison to Ultrawide SCSI on the same box,
but still much faster than RA7x disks, or old slow narrow SCSI. I think
someone posted some real world comparisons a few years ago. GIYF.


The hardware is viewed as
garbage, but can be a good source of parts for Alpha's running OpenVMS.


Except that only certain PC grade parts will work with VMS and they tend
to be at the high-end pricewise which is not the end where we do our
fishing. :-)



Much less true of recent hardware. I think any generic IDE drive
will work with an IDE-capable Alpha or Itanium.


FWIW, I have used 80->68 and 68->50 pin adapters

I ran for quite a while using an 18GB SCA drive in my PWS433au this way.

Actually can't the XP1000's use IDE HD's? Alternately there are the Acard
IDE-to-SCSI converters though they cost money (which is why I don't have
any).


WHile I appreciate everyone's attempts to help, you always seem to ignore
the place where I keep saying I have $0.00 budget for anything related to
VMS. I do it because I think it is worthwhile and important for the
students. That opinion is not shared by anyone here. That's why I beg
and borrow (I haven't yet resorted to stealing :-) what I can to keep it
going. I see no likelihood of this changing on the horizon.


This whole subthread was in the context of your somehow acquiring an
Alpha or few, either through donation, dumpster-diving or Ebay or the
like. Given that acquisition, people have been providing suggestions
for getting more use out of it that are either free (except your time
:-) or very cheap. (There appears to be an offer of free 4-9GB drives
above. I acquired 10 RZ29's (4.3GB) for a total of $45 on Ebay about
a year ago ($3/drive + $15 for shipping.)


bill



--
John Santos
Evans Griffiths & Hart, Inc.
781-861-0670 ext 539
.

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