Jarkko Hietaniemi wrote:
Indeed. I've seen UNIX servers with 1+ year uptime, but sooner or later
either a disk crash or a need to patch something urgent brings them down
either by accident or by necessity. VMS takes uptime rather seriously.
(I don't know for certain but I assume that one can patch a cluster one
node at a time so that the services of the cluster remain available.)
VMS does sort of cheat in that they take the "never add any features" route to
avoiding upgrades. Though I have heard rumors that VMS can do things like
patching running kernels and processes.
While it is laudable to have an OS that's just a dedicated server OS with no
further desktop aspirations... come on guys. 256 character exec limit? Most
VMS servers are using ODS-2 which is a non-case preserving (think DOS)
filesystem. Only allows 8 directories deep, alphanumerics (plus _- and $)
with 39 character filenames. No dot allowed in the filename, that's reserved
for extensions. Hateful to work around this.
It took them until 1998 to fix this with ODS-5 but most VMS servers still use
ODS-2.
--
52. Not allowed to yell “Take that Cobra” at the rifle range.
-- The 213 Things Skippy Is No Longer Allowed To Do In The U.S. Army
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