11-Oct-2005

Power failure
This morning, when accessing Io's secure Communigate port, it didn't react. Diana's mail access was no problem, so I had to find out what was wrong. Telnetting to Diana from Athene worked and I could see the system had recovered from some error 15 hours earlier. There were no clues in operator.log, errorlog or sysdump, so the only solution was a power failure. And indeed, yesterday there had indeed been a power failure of about 20 minutes. Since Charon and Diana are set up to boot automatically on power up, these systems were up and running. But Io has no such setting (yet) so therefore, it could not be accessed.
Technical updates
Yesterday and today were the VMS Technical Update Days (1) where we (system developers (some), system managers (most) and CIO's (were there any?)) were briefed on the current and future state of VMS, including what is to come in 8.3. And, of course, it's always fun to meet good friends, from the OpenVMS SIG and the bootcamp, including the HP technicians and our one and only soul-sister Sue Skonetski.
The last hours I joined the sessions on security and computer forensics by Laura Chappell of the Protocol Analysis Institute, mostly Windows and Unix based. Of course there was a question (not mine...) if she had any experience on and with VMS. She hadn't, "... but if anyone could lend me one"... I offered her access, and she might take it. I'll keep you updated.
And to those trying to hack their way in: Beware. I have new tools (toys?) to track you down.
The continueing story - AKA Soap
Of course, there has been no action on this front these two days. Just that I had a chance to ask HP's Brad McCusker (Mr. Unix Protability) who asked for more detail. I'll send info down to him.
(will (no doubt) be continued)
Athene problems
Working on Athene is troublesome. It's sometimes very sluggish, and typing even this text jumps now and then, just showing up the text when the type-ahead buffer is emptied. Telnet doesn't work fine either: as if the video cannot keep up with the connection. Might be NETBIOS, just learned (one of thos Windows protocols that behave like a stubborn, naughty, bad behaving child (The way Lause Chappell visualised it can (alas) not be repeated in text. And there is no video available...)
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notes
[1] Thanks, of course, to Gerrit Woertman, one of the Dutch OpenVMS ambassadors, for getting this event to the Netherlands once again. And, of course, to Sue Skonetski and all those VMS engineers for their willingness to leave their families for a few weeks: Guy (who just turned 30 and misses his little daughter badly), Brad, Doug and those I didn't mention.

I had to explain where I spent these two days. And VMSTUD is an abbreviation that can easily be misunderstood: I guess VMS.TUD is another event than VM.STUD.