July 2010

[30-Jul-2010]
Systems Admin Appreciation Day 2010:   Today is the 11th annual Systems administration appreciation day. Go on, appreciate us. (14 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)

Unified validation service:   The WC3 have come out with a unified validation service called Unicorn. This service allows you to validate the HTML, CSS, and ATOM/RSS feeds on a page all in one call. I've added a link in the navigation pane called "Validate everything" to take advantage of this. (95 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)

[15-Jul-2010]
Universal symbol deletion:   Quite some time ago, I assisted the company I now work for to do a port of their in-house ERP system from Alpha to Itanium. As expected, some of the source code was missing when I got around to attempting to compile the entire system. Unfortunately, one of the bits that was missing was the source code to the large screen handling library that the application used. (533 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)

[07-Jul-2010]
I'll wait:   OpenVMS 8.4 was released on 21st June for Alpha and Integrity platforms. 16 days later, the first Update patch is out for it. Oh, you don't see it in my patch feeds you say? Wait 'til I fix the missing release date problem that has come back with 8.4 patches. Needless to say, I won't be rushing to update my production servers any time soon. (65 words, 2 comments, 0 pings)

[01-Jul-2010]
Dangerous patches:   If you're running Alpha 8.3 OpenVMS, and you wish to apply the latest upgrade patch (as you eventually should) you better have the latest SYS patch on as well. If you don't you'll end up with an error applying the update. It seems that Engineering has lost it. Patch kits have come to us in the past with checks to ensure that prerequisite patches are applied. But not this one. The really worrying thing is that this was pointed out to Engineering back with the V1100 patch and they still haven't fixed it for V1300. (122 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)