July 2004

[27-Jul-2004]
Blackout:   Last night, I was watching TV after dinner. This is unusual for me unless there is a good movie on, but I wanted to see how much of a propaganda vehicle "The Grid" is. I didn't get to find out, because about 20 minutes into the show, the power went out. After worrying about my computers, and disconnecting them as a precaution for when power was restored, I went to bed as it appeared obvious that we would be blacked out for an extended period. Twenty minutes later, my phone was ringing, and someone was telling me the disturbing news that the data centre had completely lost power. (362 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)

[23-Jul-2004]
ISEE SPOP configured:   I spent most of today watching the configuration and learning about the ISEE SPOP machine. This machine is the focal point for all OpenVMS machines that have the ISEE client software installed on them. (144 words, 2 comments, 0 pings)

[22-Jul-2004]
Unexpected behaviour revisited:   Last year, I described another problem where a call to $IO_PERFORMW would return an unexpected SS$_FANDLEBUSY status. I note today that patch VMS732_SYS-V0400 is released that fixes this problem. (29 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)

ACL weirdness revisited:   A couple of months ago, I described a problem where an ACL was apparently getting out of synch between two nodes in a cluster. Yesterday, Engineering confirmed that this is indeed a problem, and based on the workaround, which involves setting the SECURITY.SYS file to not be cached via XFC, I have a good guess as to where the bug is. And it's not a configuration problem. (68 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)

[21-Jul-2004]
Password policies:   A password filter is a module that can deny certain password combinations as valid passwords when a user attempts to use the $ SET PASSWORD command. Here's how to install/deinstall one. (304 words, 1 comments, 0 pings)

[13-Jul-2004]
Computer Weekly Article:   A great article at Computer Weekly extolling the virtues of OpenVMS entitled Hack-proof and crash resistant - have you discovered the OS world's best-kept secret? (59 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)