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HP OpenVMS Systemsask the wizard |
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The Question is: Our company has a digital alpha (dec 3000 ) that is currently running OPEN VMS v 1.5-1H1. This system has one task only. It is conneted to a image recorder called an LVT. This LVT was orginaly sold as a complete intergrated package by Kodak for pre-press houses such as my employer. The Aplha is a stand alone system and is NOT networked to the MACs that comprise our working environment. Our problem boils down to this: We can only sneaker net files into the Alpha by walking over and using a syquest that is attached to the Alpha. For a bunch policy reasons that are rather boring they want to keep it off the network and network the Alpha to a PC running NT .... so that we have a 'little' network comprised of the Alpha and the NT machine so to speak in the corner.... where we all can now walk over and use the NT as a means of transfering files to the Alpha machine. The primary reason my employer wants to take this approach is because it is easy to attach any device to the NT PC - zip,jaz, syquest etc. My question is this, how hard a task is it to connect an Alpha running OpenVms and a NT pc. using a in-expensive hub from Fry's. Should I get them to upgrade to a more current version of Open VMS first? And to further stir this pot they only want to use Windows NT Workstation 4x they do not want to pay for a full version of NT server software. The only other background I have not mentioned is when LVT was a sub-division of KODAK we had great service and last summer KODAK sold it to another company. ---- who has told us our only recourse is to buy a whole new system ... printer, nt pc etc... which will run about 30k and my boss wants to see if wew can go this route first before we spend a great deal of money. It is obvious, I think by now I am not a 'network professional' and my expierence with computers is basicly installing software and setting up PC's and MAC's... but I have been doing this for ten years and know aliitle about TCP/IP and basic networking. But i am not, a 'VMS/UNIX gearhead' (sic) if only to provide you with a better picture. thanks for yor time and I hope you anwser sincerely jack smith The Answer is : You will want to move to OpenVMS Alpha V6.2, V7.1-2, or V7.2, after determining what (if any) OpenVMS version dependencies might be present in the LVT package. V1.5 and V1.5-1H1 are no longer supported releases. Most OpenVMS systems were sold with a NAS license package, which permits the installation and use of networking packages such as DECnet and (more interesting in this case) TCP/IP Services. The latter permits connections to remote systems via FTP, NFS, PCNFS, and similar IP-based protocols. More involved would be the installation and configuration of the PATHWORKS (Advanced Server) or SAMBA packages, which would allow the OpenVMS system to more directly participate in the Windows NT network environment. (With PATHWORKS LanManager and OpenVMS V7.1 and later, the same password can be used on the Windows NT domain and on OpenVMS, and a password change in either place will also change it in the other.) It is interesting that you want to add devices to the Windows NT system, though you already have these devices connected on the OpenVMS system. Recent versions of OpenVMS are also reasonably good at connecting to "odd" SCSI devices. (Though one should never underestimate the bandwidth of a delivery truck filled with Zip disks...) There are tools available that can read FAT format disks directly on OpenVMS, as well, if this is a concern. An OpenVMS system tends to be completely immune to the Microsoft Word macro viruses, bootstrap block viruses, Exchange-related viruses, and similar such problems commonly found among various Microsoft Windows NT, Windows 95, and Windows 98 systems. OpenVMS upgrade and installation documentation, as well as new features documentation is available in the OpenVMS documentation set. TCP/IP has its own documentation, as does PATHWORKS (Advanced Server).
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