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Welcome to the fourth issue of the OpenVMS Technical Journal (VTJ).
This issue has eleven articles that I am sure you will find interesting. To highlight just a few of the articles: If you really like security make sure to read the ACME article. And once again we
have continuing articles on TCP/IP and T4 which I know you will enjoy. Dave Sullivan has also written a great article on OpenVMS web services which is not to be missed.
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Your feedback is essential to the growth and development of this journal, please take a moment,
we want to hear what you have to say.
Sincere thanks go not only to all the excellent authors but to the team that allow us to produce this journal. Writing Manager and member of the VTJ core team Mike Meagher,with writers Carolyn
Crowell, Kathleen Johnson, June Lemen, Mary Marotta, Sarah Masella, Joe McMullen, Pat Nelson, and Merle Roesler are responsible for editing and final art of each one of the articles. Warren Sander,
VTJ core team member and our OpenVMS Web Master without his extensive work and knowledge we would not be able to deliver this journal.
Warm Regards,
Sue Skonetski
Editor
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Article Title: [ » HTML , » PDF ]
Introduction to developing ACME agents
Article Author: Takaaki Shinagawa
Article Abstract: ACME is the
new authentication subsystem provided on OpenVMS v7.3-2 Alpha as SDK (Software
Development Kit). Compared to the
traditional $LGI LOGINOUT authentication on OpenVMS, ACME provides a
"plug-in" environment in which individual ACME agents for different authentication policies
can be loaded independently. In
addition, ACME allows application programs to perform authentication directly
through the $ACM system service.
Currently HP provides a few ACME agents including native VMS age nt,
Windows NTLM agent, and LDAP agent. It
is also possible for third parties to develop ACME agents for new
authentication policies. Although the
concept of ACME is very similar to PAM (Pluggable Authentication Module) on Unix
platforms, ACME has its proprietary architecture and APIs. Developing an ACME agent requires solid
understandings of the overall ACME subsystems, interactions between ACME
agents, data structures and callout functions in the agent, Persona extensions,
and ACM clients. In this article,
development and installation procedures of an ACME agent will be described with
examples for developers implementing new ACME agents
Author Bio: Taka is a software engineer in OpenVMS group
specializing in security and related technologies and a Certified Information System Security Professional (CISSP).
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Article Title: [ » HTML , » PDF ]
Parallelism and Performance in the OpenVMS TCP/IP Kernel
Article Author: Robert Rappaport, Yanick Pouffary, Steve Lieman, Mary J. Marotta
Article Abstract: In Version 5.4, TCP/IP Services for OpenVMS introduced the _scalable kernel,_ which
provides improved scalability for symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) systems. By designing an improved mechanism for
queuing network I/O, restricting I/O requests to a single designated CPU, and
using a dynamic spinlock to lock the main internal database, t he scalable
kernel has been shown to improve maximum network application throughput, or
_headroom,_ when compared to earlier versions of TCP/IP Services. The potential maximum headroom increases with
the number of CPUs in the system.
The new
scalable kernel will replace the classic TCP/IP kernel in the next release of
TCP/IP Services for OpenVMS. This
article describes the design of the new scalable kernel and how it can
dramatically improve the performance of network applications.
Author Bio: Robert Rappaport has worked for Digital/Compaq/HP
for more than 27 years, with 25 of those years in OpenVMS. He am the author of numerous OpenVMS drivers,
including the DUDRIVER and the TUDRIVER. For the last 12 years, he has worked
on the TCP/IP kernel; he was one of the principal engineers who ported the
Tru64 UNIX kernel to OpenVMS. For the
last 4 years, he has been dedicated to the design and implementation of the
Scalable Kernel.
Robert is a
graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a Bachelor of
Science in Mathematics (1964) and a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering
(1968) and is, by his own admission, a hell of a guy.
Author Bio: Yanick Pouffary is a Distinguished Technologist at
Hewlett Packard and provides Networks Technical Direction within the OpenVMS
Systems Division. Yanick has been working on networking software products since
1985. She has worked on DECnet, DECnet over TCP/IP and has been involved with
IPv6 since 1996. Yanick is a member of the HP Wide IPv6 Initiative Core Team
and a member of the HP Network Architecture Forum that drives network server
technologies across business division within HP. In the industry Yanick is a
member of the IPv6 Forum Technical Directorate (http://www.ipv6forum.com)
and North American IPv6 Task Force (http://www.nav6tf.org).
Yanick is one of the distinguished recipients of the IPv6 Forum Internet
Pioneer Award for her technology contributions within the IPv6 Forum to support
the adoption and deployment of IPv6. Yanick participates in the IETF where her
main focus is in IPv6 and Transport Protocol Area.
Yanick
earned a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Nice, France and a M.S. in Computer Science from
the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
Author Bio: Steve Lieman is a member of the OpenVMS
Performance Group. He is an award- winning author who has more than 30 years
large system performance experience with the last 7 years focusing on OpenVMS.
He has delivered seminars on practical performance management at more than 30
locations worldwide and has published over 70 articles on the subject. He is
currently working on OpenVMS benchmarking, performance characterization and
tool enhancement projects and is frequently called in to help troubleshoot
customer performance problems. With a Masters Degree in Computer Science from
Carnegie-Mellon University, Steve has been a long-time student
of best performance practices.
Author Bio: Mary J. Marotta is an Information Developer for
Hewlett-Packard Company and has been a technical writer for 25 years. After
earning her Bachelor of Arts degree in English from the University of Massachusetts
at Amherst, Mary joined Digital Equipment
Corporation's associate technical writing program. After five years, she became
responsible for the entire DECsystem-10 documentation set, writing marketing
information and training material as well.
For the
past five years, Mary has been developing and maintaining customer information
for the TCP/IP Services product, including customer documentation, HELP files,
web pages, and VMS technical journal articles.
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Article Title: [ » HTML , » PDF ]
Examining Web Services: Protecting your OpenVMS Investment
Article Author: David Sullivan
Artcle Abstract: In the last
few years web services technologies have been introduced to aid in the
development of truly heterogeneous and platform agnostic solutions. These
open-standards-based technologies are extensible, internet friendly and solve
real business needs.
This paper
illustrates the why's, where's and how's of web services. It shows why OpenVMS
customers need web services, where to use different architectural approaches
for existing OpenVMS solutions and how the individual technologies which
comprise web services work.
Simply put,
web services are about investment protection for past, present and future
applications. With web services, older OpenVMS applications written decades ago
can be reused from the latest technologies such as Microsoft .NET and
J2EE. However, great care must be taken
to understand the technologies before designing a solution. As with any
project, it's the job of the craftsman to use the right tool for the job. Web
Services are tools which address specific business needs. They can be used in a
variety of ways depending on the goals of the project. We will examine the web
service standards XML, WDSL, SOAP and UDDI to understand how they work and
their relationships to each other.
Author Bio: David is an Expert Member Technical Staff
in the OpenVMS group of Hewlett Packard. He holds a B.S. in Computer Science
from Merrimack College. David has previously been
published in the Digital Technical Journal and has written a number of
whitepapers on networking, still imaging protocol extensions for video
conferencing, disaster tolerance design, and web services. He is a United States patent holder for internet browser
interceptor and caching technology.
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Article Title: [ » HTML , » PDF ]
Adding a Friend to T4 and Friends - Incorporating BEA WebLogic Server 8.1 Performance Data
Author Name: Patrick McConnell
Article Abstract: With the
deployment of WebLogic Server 8.1 on the OpenVMS platform, there is the need to
correlate WebLogic Server performance metrics with OpenVMS performance
metrics. This article illustrates the
process of determining what WebLogic Serve r performance metrics could be
obtained, how they can be obtained via a JMX application, and how to integrate
the WebLogic performance metrics into the T4 framework (see
"TimeLine-Driven Collaboration with T4 & Friends: A Powerful, Universal, Time-saving Approach
to OpenVMS Performance" from the January 2004 issue of the OpenVMS
Technical Journal). An example Java JMX
application to obtain the WebLogic Server performance metrics and place them
into an XML container and an example Java application to convert the XML file
to a format compatible with T4 will be detailed.
Author Bio: Patrick is the Technical Project Leader for the OpenVMS Performance Group
With 26+
years of experience in software and performance engineering, including 7+ years
with the OpenVMS Performance Group. Mr. McConnell has developed and delivered
numerous, practical seminars on system performance analysis and performance
tool development to technical audiences, including CETS and the OpenVMS
Technical Symposium. Mr. McConnell holds a master's degree in Computer Science
from BostonUniversity, and a bachelor's degree in
Computer Science from the University of Maine at Orono.
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Article Title: [ » HTML , » PDF ]
HP OpenVMS Clusters and IBM MQSeries Failover Sets:
Article Author: John Edelmann
Article Abstract: This article focuses on the use of IBM
MQSeries failover sets within an OpenVMS Cluster configuration. The goal of such an arrangement is to
maximize MQSeries (messaging middleware) availability.
IBM's product, MQSeries (currently rebranded WebSphere MQ) is a robust and
"guaranteed delivery" messaging subsystem, that supports many diverse
vendors' OS and hardware servers. This
article, however, explores and details high availability deployment on OpenVMS Clusters using an IBM configuration
called "Failover Sets". The
combination of this IBM-developed failover capability coupled with OpenVMS
Cluster availability, results in a very nearly fault tolerant environment for
customers relying on IBM's product for messaging middleware. It is, therefore, a unique solution.
The article
assumes that the reader is familiar with OpenVMS Cluster concepts, and rather,
describes, with examples, how the Failover mechanism can be deployed.
Author Bio: John is presently a technology
consultant in the HP Services, Consulting, and Integration group. In 1999, he was accepted into the OpenVMS
Ambassadors program, and in 2002, became an IBM MQSeries Certified Solutions
Expert. He is a recognized subject
matter expert (SME) on MQSeries Clusters within the Defense Information System Agency
(DISA) of the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), and has conducted several
seminars for DISA and other DoD customers in the area of MQSeries cluster configuration,
concepts, and troubleshooting.
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Article Title: [ » HTML , » PDF ]
Revision and Configuration Management (RCM) for OpenVMS
Article Author: Pat Moran
Article Abstract: This article describes the HP Services tool, Revision and Configuration Management
(RCM), which collects detailed system configuration information from HP systems
at customer sites worldwide. The data is stored on the RCM server in HP, and used
to create configuration, change, comparison and analysis reports which are
accessible by the customer and HP account team through the Electronic Site
Management Guide (eSMG). RCM was developed by HP's Mission Critical and
Proactive Services group.
RCM is available for OpenVMS VAX and Alpha systems from V6.2 to V7.3-2, as well as for
HP Tru64 UNIX, Windows NT/2000 and HP-UX systems. This paper describes the RCM
architecture and focuses on the design of the RCM OpenVMS Collector. It
describes the main features of the RCM reports, such as: recommendations for
critical patches, detailed information on disk and tape devices, installed software
and patches, firmware revision levels, hardware part numbers and revision
levels, SAN controller details and topology map, and EVA configuration reports.
By collecting system configuration information on a regular schedule, the RCM
change reports make it possible for the Customer, and HP Service personnel, to
quickly diagnose problems which may have been introduced by recent
configuration changes.
RCM has been deployed on thousands of OpenVMS systems and is a key part of HP's
Services portfolio.
Author Bio: Pat is a Software Engineer, and OpenVMS
Ambassador, in HP's Mission Critical and Proactive Services group in Galway,
Ireland. He has over 20 years experience of
software development on OpenVMS. He was the developer of the VAX version of CLUE
(Crash Log Utility Extractor), and has worked on the HP Service tools, System
Healthcheck (SHC) and Revision Configuration Management (RCM). He also
developed the CSVPNG graphing utility discussed in the December Technical
Journal article "TimeLine-Driven Collaboration with T4 & Friends: A
Time-saving Approach to OpenVMS Performance"
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Article Title: [ » HTML , » PDF ]
Including OpenVMS Oracle and Oracle Rdb database servers in a heterogeneous backup solution
Article Author: Siobhan Ellis
Article Abstract: It has been
difficult for datacentres to reduce the total cost of ownership and to improve
the return on Investment on hardware in a heterogeneous environment that
contains OpenVMS. This has been particularly true if Oracle or Oracle Rdb applications
are being used. This article looks at how a complete heterogeneous backup and
restore solution can be implemented, including these vital databases.
Author Bio:
Siobhan Ellis is a Senior Technical Consultant at EnStor, a company that delivers Storage and System Virtualisation Solutions. She joined EnStor, in Sydney, in January 2005 having just returned to
Australia after 5 years at Legato where she was a Senior Product Manager. She was responsible for the HP platforms, OpenVMS, Tru64 UNIX and HP-UX, as well as device management and the management of
NetWorker. She came to Legato, with real world implementation experience after over 14 years in Digital/Compaq. Siobhan started in Digital's own internal IS department in the UK as a VAX/VMS system
manager implementing many of the POLYCENTER tools before POLYCENTER even existed. She then became a Senior Consultant, specializing in data centre automation, and finally moving to Australia in 1995
as a Senior Technical Architect in Digital/Compaq's outsourcing organisation.
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Article Title: [ » HTML , » PDF ]
Best of Ask the Wizard
Author Name: Stephen "Hoff" Hoffman
Article Abstract: This article is about the Ask the Wizard area's features that customers
might not be aware of and how to use them
Author Bio: Hoff, is a Senior Member of Technical Staff within
the OpenVMS Engineering group, with a variety of responsibilities. Areas of
experience include voice applications and telephony, factory floor networking,
databases, device drivers and ACPs, web and internet technologies, hardware,
puns, clustering, emergency pharmacology and fire suppression. Writings include
the second editions of the "Writing Real Programs in DCL" and the
"OpenVMS System Management" books from Digital Press, as well as
various articles for the OpenVMS Technical Journal, and even a few postings to
newsgroups such as comp.os.vms.
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