On Tue, 19 Oct 2004, Richard Hoffbeck wrote: > DEC had a nice version of X and a POSIX layer so in principle it should > be able to run R if it doesn't stray too far from the standards - > assuming someone wants to go to the trouble. Sure, but I'll bet you $50 that no one ever goes to the trouble and R is *never* available on VMS. You should take me up on this bet because you will only lose after eternity has passed! I feel that it is extremely unlikely that I will lose, but the probability is non-zero. The important point here is that VMS *is* good, and much *could* be done with it, but it ain't gonna happen. Imagine that you are a developer. You could make any of the hundred or so changes on your to-do list, or you could port your program to VMS and have to maintain it there too. If you are smart, you won't waste your time with VMS. > VMS is light years ahead of stock Linux as regards host security. Its > object based security model is pretty much the same as the one in > NT/2000/XP which works pretty well if developers take the time to do the > analysis, but even simple things like access control lists make a big > difference and have only recently shown up in Linux. I don't know the technical details so I won't argue, but this is the first time someone has suggested to me that NT may be superior to Linux in any domain of security. I am aware of access control lists and we want to use them on Linux. I agree that it makes a big difference in our working environment and that VMS seems to have an edge there, but it won't last long. Access control lists are bound to be widely implemented in Linux soon enough and I think they are available in some filesystems already. > The thing to keep in mind about VMS is that it hasn't been updated > significantly since the days when all networks were considered trusted > so its going to be much better against attacks on host security rather > than those coming through the network - actually the same seems to be > true of most of the IT folks around here :-) Sure, but I consider attacks via the network to be much more serious and much more problematic. On Linux/UNIX systems, I can name a dozen or so times that I, or friends of mine, have been cracked via the net, but not one time when it was an inside job. > I can certainly understand the cases where there are long-term projects > tied to applications developed against software tightly tied to VMS - > think CCCS or ARIC - where the cost of redeploying the applications > isn't funded. But only a complete idiot would be doing new development > against VMS. The Alpha chip is toast, there's no migration/upgrade path, > support is going away, software is expensive/obsolete/proprietary, ... > stop me anytime ... :-) No - keep going! ;-) We have long-term projects that may be locked into VMS, but most work can be done on other systems. We need to move as much work as possible off of VMS. We can do this gradually, but we must do it. Reducing the burden on the VMS servers will help the projects that are truly locked into VMS. My choice of OS for our next bunch of servers is Linux. I think some filesystems are already implementing access control lists, but that is one of the only things I really want that we don't have. Am I missing anything? Linux seems very stable and robust now, but I would like to be contradicted on this point if any of you believe that Linux is not so stable and that there are better solutions. Mike _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota Help beta test TCLUG's potential new home: http://plone.mn-linux.org Got pictures for TCLUG? Beta test http://plone.mn-linux.org/gallery tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list