UNIX Administratosphere

Sun decided to put CIFS support directly into the Solaris kernel instead of using SAMBA. Serverwatch reported on it, as did TechRepublic.

This sounds like a good idea: put support into the kernel where it is faster and has access to more of the insides of the kernel (rather than going through interfaces).  It is like programming on the bare metal instead of using the standard toolbox calls (or API).

However, the downside is not often reported: this will make the kernel even larger and opens up security risks as well.  I tend more to believe in the small kernel more than anything, and Solaris already appears to be one of the largest kernels in the open source arena.

Time will tell whether this was a good idea or not.

Recently, I had the chance to get a book that described how to make OpenVMS work with Linux.  Unfortunately, the entire book was 1) a list of screen-shots, and 2) about how to get OpenVMS 7 to act like (or interact with) Red Hat 7.

I was hoping for more details, and so on.  I was also hoping for documentation on how to get Linux to support OpenVMS networking and data and so forth.  The biggest project in this area is the Linux DECnet project, which wasn’t mentioned even once.

Well…. I went looking.  I’m not a OpenVMS wizard (yet!) but there are many tools that seem to be quite nice, though many of them aren’t maintained any longer:

• CDROMS: an application (written by a fellow at SUSE!) to allow reading OpenVMS ODF CDs on Linux
• A DECnet network bridge
• A KDE IO slave for DECnet
• An authentication module for Linux that allows VMS users to use their VMS passwords on the Linux system

Support for DECnet is now included in the kernel, though the Linux DECnet Project still has some excellent documentation like this DECnet FAQ.  There is a nice (though old) article about DECnet from Linux Journal.

Remember: I can’t vouch for any of these - it just seemed to me that projects like these are not likely to be known, and I wanted to get them out there.

One aside: it turns out there is a shop that provides VAX emulators, PDP-11 emulators, and Alpha emulators for running OpenVMS on Windows: Salem Automation Incorporated is probably best known for CHARON-VAX, though they have all of the others as well. There is a personal version of the CHARON Alpha Emulator.  Again, I can’t vouch for them, but I do know that CHARON-VAX in the past seems to have been quite popular and well respected - but your experience may vary.