On Wed, 20 Oct 2004, Jeff Nelson wrote: > Mike Miller wrote: > >> I would be very interested in hearing more from the people on this >> list. I am especially interested in knowing any ways in which VMS is >> *superior* to Linux. > > Stability. > Security. > Reliability. > Availability. Are there any independent studies comparing VMS with Linux/UNIX OSs? I've seen claims like 99.999% availability, but that would be only 5 minutes downtime per year. We haven't been that lucky where I work. Also, where I work, we can live with an occasional hour of downtime to get the rich features and low cost of Linux instead of the feature poverty and high cost of VMS. > Nothing gets ported or even written for Linux unless someone steps up > and does it. You are certainly free to port R to VMS if you like. I guess we agree, but did you understand my point? My point was not that it is impossible to write software for VMS, or that it is harder to write for VMS than for Linux/UNIX, my point was that thousands of people have developed hundreds or thousands of programs to run on Linux/UNIX and these programs are freely available on the internet. VMS is not undergoing any of this development. It is stagnating. Sure, someone could reverse that trend and port R, Octave, and other programs to VMS, but it looks like isn't going to happen. At any rate, it hasn't happened, and this is the chief reason why I already prefer Linux/UNIX to VMS. > VMS has a very loyal customer base. And VMS is still going strong. If by that statement, you mean that your employer, HP, if it remains solvent, has no immediate plan to put an end to VMS development, I believe you. If by "going strong" you mean that many independent programmers are developing open source software for OpenVMS, I don't think so. > Another example: the specialization of privileges and access control > lists. There's just one privilege (root) with Linux, though access > control lists are starting to appear. I appreciate your > Second, DEFCON 9 (July 2001) labeled VMS "Cool and Unhackable" after > attempts were made to hack into a standard VMS system with no firewall > between it and the hackers. The hackers even had access to an > unprivileged user account. VMS is the only operating system to achieve > this rating. To be "labeled" as "Cool and Unhackable" is a "rating"? Do you have any evidence for this? I thought I would find something official about this, but I only found a lot of corporate marketing stuff that used similar, but not identical claims. I have the impression that hackers aren't interested in OpenVMS and they aren't using it at DefCon anymore. This could be a good thing for OpenVMS. > Third, VMS has earned a security rating from the Department of Defense. I don't know what that means. Is that something that DoD has given to VMS but not to any Linux or UNIX OSs? > A recent version of HP TCP/IP Services for OpenVMS supports SSH. Perhaps > you didn't realize it was available? And seeing as how you are at a > university, you might consider talking to your HP representative to see > if you qualify for the university pricing. I hear it's quite attractive. You are right, I didn't know it was available. I wonder if our IT guys didn't know about this. It was part of our Divisional >> If someone can convince me that use of VMS on servers is a good plan >> for a University department, please do so because it will make me feel >> better about what's happening where I work. I would be especially >> encouraged if you would recommend it for a new unit that has no server >> system in place. > > Let me know if I can be of any more help. I thank you again for your comments. If you want to respond to my more recent comments, that would be great. In general, I'm interested in Linux/VMS interoperability. I'm also interested in moving services from VMS to Linux. Nothing you have told me makes me think that I should not try to move almost everything from VMS to Linux. We don't want to get rid of our VMS machines yet and we might keep them for quite a few years, but we can get more out of Linux. > I would be happy to put you in touch with someone at HP who can better > talk to your needs. We are already in touch with HP because we have two OpenVMS servers. We also use HP for support for Linux. Mike _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota Help beta test TCLUG's potential new home: http://plone.mn-linux.org Got pictures for TCLUG? Beta test http://plone.mn-linux.org/gallery tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list