When an employee leaves the company deleting log-in credentials is not enough
The other day while working an issue at a customer site I noticed and happened to mention that there were two sets of application processes running, one set running under some generic name like...
View ArticleTesting network connectivity – alternatives to ping
Your application is reporting problems reaching the back end database server at 172.16.1.116 or maybe you are about to set up a new application and you want to make sure it can reach the back end...
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Line termination problems when using SFTP
SFTP is the FTP subsystem that is part of SSH, it allows you to do encrypted file transfers. In the past week I have had 2 issues about SFTP not properly transferring files. In one case OpenVOS was...
View ArticleTelnetd and remote (TCP connected) printers
Back in May of 2009 I wrote about securing telnetd so that only the RSN process has the ability to use it (Telnet can’t live with it, can’t live without it). At the time I was thinking about the remote...
View ArticleVOS/OpenVOS Release Information
The information about current releases/versions of the VOS/OpenVOS operating system for V Series and Continuum systems has changed locations on the Stratus web pages. The latest data is at...
View ArticleNetwork traces and data security
Many times the only way, or at least the fastest way, to resolve network communications problems is by collecting a trace of the communication and sending it to an expert for analysis. When the expert...
View ArticleApplication event notification via E-mail
Your application just detected a critical condition, you can write a message to an application log or even the syserr_log but how do you notify someone right now that the application needs attention?...
View ArticleBest Practices for ftScalable Storage RAID configuration
In this posting, I offer advice on how to configure your ftScalableTM Storage Array (hereafter abbreviated to ftScalable) to optimize its performance. By understanding your I/O workload and patterns...
View ArticleUpdated stcp_statistics package
I have just corrected a problem reported by a user of the STCP statistics package that we provide on the VOS anonymous FTP site. This package contains source code that demonstrates how to gather...
View ArticleIT Myths – TCP guarantees delivery of your data
A common misconception is that TCP guarantees delivery of the data. What TCP actually guarantees is that it will deliver the data to the receiving host’s TCP stack or report an error to the sending...
View ArticleMaking Things Too Easy
The OpenVOS Operating System provides a high-level Application Programming Interface (API) that on the whole makes programming the system easy. But sometimes, it becomes too easy – because a simple...
View ArticleSSH and Passwords, Oh My!
As more and more people start using SSH in place of Telnet, I am seeing more and more confusion over the way that the SSH daemon treats password warning, expiration, and grace times. Part of the...
View ArticleWhat is your IP address?
Recently while troubleshooting a connection problem this question arose. The OpenVOS system was connecting to a public Internet facing server. The administrator for the server asked a simple question...
View ArticleMaking Things Too Easy- Part 2
The OpenVOS Operating System provides a high-level Application Programming Interface (API) that on the whole makes programming the system easy. But sometimes, it becomes too easy – because a simple...
View ArticlePG is on Twitter!
I have joined the Twitter movement! You can follow me at “stratuspaulg”. I intend to post tidbits of useful information about OpenVOS. If a topic doesn’t fit in 140 characters, I’ll create a blog...
View ArticleUntested code doesn’t work!
This story is an edited version of a message I recently posted on the Multics forum on LinkedIn. Having your changes “go live” very quickly can be a powerful incentive. This is the story about the...
View ArticleDon’t forget to handle a graceful close, even if they can’t happen
The following STCP code fragment demonstrates a problem that I have observed. It blocks on the recv call until there is data to read, then it processes the received data and calls recv again which...
View ArticleThe lzip file compression command is now available!
I ported the lzip file compression utility to OpenVOS Release 17.0.2 today. It uses an improved algorithm that gives better results than zip, gzip, or bzip2. Some file-transfer sites, such as gnu.org,...
View ArticleEmbedding passwords in a program is not very secure
The other day I came across a program that allowed me to select from a prepackaged set of queries and then communicated with a server to retrieve the answer to the selected query. I began to wonder...
View ArticleHow to Port Open-Source Code to OpenVOS
If you are considering porting open-source code to VOS or OpenVOS, I strongly recommend that you read the presentation that my colleague Richard Boylan and I have written on this topic. He and I have...
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