ITEC Home PageC S S C N E W S L E T T E R Vol 1 No 8 July 28, 1993 TABLE OF CONTENTS 1.0 New CSLG/ESL program and PAKs 2.0 Articles of Interest 3.0 Last call for Site Inventory Reports...four missing. 4.0 Availability of DCLFast...DCL debugging, Tuning and Testing product 5.0 Time to clean up user accounts on SBSCVA 6.0 Calls received/answered by SCACAD, SCADM and SCSYS for June 1993 1.0 New CSLG/ESL program and PAKs We are still in the process of renewing the CSLG and ESL for the Common SUNY Support Center. We don't have a timeframe when we will be getting the new PAKs but our current ones are licensed until December 1, 1993. So it should be a quiet transformation and nothing to worry about. 2.0 Articles of Interest From time to time we all come across "technical" articles that are of interest to us and that, when we think about it, would be of interest to other CSSC members. Following are summaries from three articles that Ron Brown would like to share with you. The first two articles come from DIGITAL NEWS & REVIEW, the June 21, 1993 issue and the last article is from the VAXCLUSTER SYSTEMS QUORUM, May 1993 documentation manual. If you are interested in any of the articles, please try to seek them out on your own. Your Digital Rep would be the person to get the VAXCLUSTER SYSTEMS QUORUM manual from. But if you cannot locate these articles, let us know and we will see that you obtain a copy. This is also a good point to stop and say that if *any of you* know of an article that would be of interest to the other CSSC members please let us know and we will mention it in the newsletter. "This elephant can dance!", DIGITAL NEWS & REVIEW, June 21, 1993, pgs. 37-39. Article deals with Digital's SCSI-compliant HSC65/95 matches SDI-based cluster storage performance while using drives with an industry-standard interface. "Wireless Lans Span the Spectrum", DIGITAL NEWS & REVIEW, June 21, 1993, pgs. 40-43. Cable-free networks seem like an ideal way to communicate, but users have to grapple with a variety of trade-offs before deciding on a wireless technology. Four wireless technologies are discussed: spread spectrum, single-frequency, infrared, and microwave and pros and cons for all four methods. "Choosing High-Performance Storage Solutions", VAXCLUSTER SYSTEMS QUORUM, May 1993, Part Number: EA-P2388-32, pgs. 3-22, "In recent years, the ability of CPUs to process information has far outstripped the ability of I/O subsystems to supply processors with data....the result of this disproportionate growth is an increasing percentage of CPU time spent waiting for I/O operations to complete. When I/O operations cannot keep up with processors, CPU cycles are wasted and application performance suffers. Solid state disks (SSD), and other Digital high-performance storage technologies, bridge the growing gap between processing speed and magnetic disk access speed. The high-performance storage technologies that are addressed in this document are: o Host-based disk caching o Controller-based caching o Solid state disk o RAM disk o RAID disk striping" 3.0 Last call for Site Inventory Reports...four missing! Thank you to everyone who sent in their Site Inventory report. We would appreciate it when we say "deadline by such and such a date" that you would try to make it in by then. Many of these reports trickeled in way after the May 1st deadline. The missing four reports needed are from: ... ... ... ... The next time you don't send back a report by a deadline we will list your names! Here is the current status of those who sent in the report or don't need to: Albany Alfred Broome Community College (Jnet only and doesn't have to report) HSC Brooklyn SBSCVC (Bob Hemmings - working for the Support Center, in Morrisville) Buffalo State College Canton Cayuga Community College Corning Community College Central Cobleskill Cortland Cornell (Jnet only and doesn't have to report) Delhi Erie Community College Empire State College Farmingdale Fashion Institute Fingerlakes Community College Genesee Community College (They have their own CSLG and report directly) Geneseo Jefferson Community College LSC (Library Services) Maritime Morrisville Mohawk Valley (They do not receive DEC products and don't have to report - per Ron) Old Westbury Oneonta (and SICAS) SUNY Optometry Oswego Plattsburgh Potsdam SUNY Purchase Schenectady Community College Stony Brook (only those sites on DECnet... Some are on NASA's high-energy physics net.) HSC Syracuse SUNY Training Center Univ. Buffalo (Oracle Only - not required to report) Utica/Rome (Jnet, Oracle, Banner only. Not required to report) 4.0 Availability of DCLFAST...DCL debugging, Tuning and Testing product DCLFAST... o modeled on the VMS debugger o removes the need to use SET VERIFY - Fix errors on-the-fly, then continue o Makes people who change, amend, modify, edit or create DCL twice as efficient o Tuning facility makes existing DCL run much faster. DCLFAST by Argent Software is being made available to CSSC members for $850 per site. Maintenance is 10% of the aggregate cost. If you would like to get information about purchasing this software, please write your inquiry to Sheila Pragel at Buffalo State College (pragelsk@snybufva). Brian Cuttler at the State University of New York at Albany has used and tested DCLFAST and will take questions on its applications (sysbrc@albnyvms). 5.0 Time to clean up user accounts on SBSCVA This note goes out to all those in charge of User Manager accounts. We need to clean up our disk space so we would appreciate it if you would review user accounts on SBSCVA and remove those that are no longer needed. This needs to be done before the fall semester starts. Thank you. 6.0 Calls received/answered by SCACAD, SCADM and SCSYS for June 1993 Vendor support SCACAD 28 4 SCSYS 276 5 SCADM 49 5 Editor: Betty Spencer SCACAD@SNYBSCVA