Server Type: VMS and VMS 7.+ Cool Beans! And background

Core FTP client questions and answers
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maurert
Posts: 59
Joined: Tue Oct 10, 2006 12:18 pm

Server Type: VMS and VMS 7.+ Cool Beans! And background

Post by maurert »

Okay I'm suitably impressed. I was clicking through the advanced site manager settings and looked at the drop down box for "Server Type". There at the bottom were two listing for VMS. Hey I support OpenVMS for a living!

What's cool is CoreFTP is aware that there were significant changes in OpenVMS's TCP/IP stack long about v7 of OpenVMS. (Yes, I know to those who love it, it's simply VMS, but I'm an employee and for branding reasons it's OpenVMS to me.)

In case this isn't covered elsewhere...

The TCP/IP stack changed for OpenVMS when UCX v4 was superceded by TCPIP for OpenVMS v5. v5 was a complete rewrite of the TCP/IP stack bring to OpenVMS a very Unix like stack. Actually it was a port of then Digital's Tru64 Unix stack to OpenVMS.

Here's the hint. UCX v4 was useable on OpenVMS v7. So if you're having trouble communicating with OpenVMS, I'd select CoreFTP's "VMS" server type if the OpenVMS host is running UCX v4 or earlier, and CoreFTP's "VMS 7+" server type the OpenVMS host is running TCPIP v5 or higher.

Just to confuse matters, there were three popular third party TCPIP stacks for OpenVMS. The dominate one is MultiNET by Process Software. I'm going to guess that IF the stack is MultiNET, then you'll want to select "VMS 7+".

OpenVMS might also be confusing for Windows and Unix people. The historical file structure used simply uppercase filename, and only support Alpha, Numeric charcters plus "$" and "_". The "." was allowed only as a sperator for the file extension and the ";" only as a seperator for the version.

However, OpenVMS does allow a system manager to modify a disk to allow all the file names that Unix and Windows have. This will be on a disk by disk basis.

Even with this newer disk structure, OpenVMS uses versions. When a file is freshly copied to directory and a file of the same name already exists, a new version it usually created, rather than overwriting the old one. This helps in not loosing old information, but it can also cause the innocent to use a lot of disk space.
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