RE: MONITOR with different architectures

-----Original Message-----
From: JF Mezei [mailto:jfmezei.spamnot@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: August 30, 2007 12:05 PM
To: Info-VAX@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: MONITOR with different architectures

Surely the patch maintainer is reading this thread and the patch
will be
up within 24 hours?


1- The engineers would have known, at the time 8.3 came out, that they
had put code in Monitor to prevent interoperability with Vax. By that
time, it seemed pretty clear that the "roadmap" promise of an 8.* for
VAX wasn't going to come, so they would have known that
interoperability
with VAX 7.3 was on the SPD.


Wow, better duck, here come the black helicopters again ....

2- So, they release 8.3 anyways with a broken Monitor and non-adherance
to SPDs. And they remained silent on the whole thing. We find out a
secret patch was made available in february 2007.


You seem to be under the impression that all patches are and/or should be released to
the public.

Every vendor has both public patches and private patches that are available under certain
Conditions to Customers who actually pay for support. Same goes for Microsoft, Red Hat,
IBM, Sun etc. its not a matter of being secretive, but in being cautious as the patch
may not have gone through all of the rigorous testing that a public patch does.

Once a fix has been sufficiently qualified, then it *may* be incorporated into a public
fix or if the impact is minimal, then it may be just incorporated into the next release
cycle.

All the SW/OS/ISV vendors take this approach.

3- Compare this with an OS such as Linux where such a huge bug would
not
be tolerated and would be fixed very rapidly and the patch made very
public.

Do you naively think Red Hat releases all of their patches to their public web sites?
Of course they have private "paying support" Cust patches as well.

Huge bug? I don't know the specifics of this issue, but I would hardly classify this as
a "huge" bug since you can always do a monitor cluster or monitor system from each node
to see that nodes information.

The real story here is that VMS engineering no longer has the
resources to provide a proper , tested, patch for an important
component
of the OS that was released broken. And VMS management are perfectly
happy to decided to not publically release the patch when it finally is
made.


Here come more of the helicopters now ...

As a hobbyist, I cannot complain. But the way this is handled
certaintly
doesn't give me confidence that VMS management still has access to
enough engineering resources to fix problems in a timely fashion. They
would rather hide them under a rug. I have yet to hear about whether
the
VMS version of Bind 8 (VAX) is immune from all the vulnerabilities that
have been made public over the years.

The does not do much good to the confidence level that VMS is still
actively being developed.

The public and private patch processes have been around for many moons - likely
dating back to V1 of OpenVMS.

Regards


Kerry Main
Senior Consultant
HP Services Canada
Voice: 613-592-4660
Fax: 613-591-4477
kerryDOTmainAThpDOTcom
(remove the DOT's and AT)

OpenVMS - the secure, multi-site OS that just works.



.

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