Copyright 1992-2016 by Kevin G. Barkes All rights reserved. This article may be duplicated or redistributed provided no alterations of any kind are made to this file. This edition of DCL Dialogue is sponsored by Networking Dynamics, developers and marketers of productivity software for OpenVMS systems. Contact our website www.networkingdynamics.com to download free demos of our software and see how you will save time, money and raise productivity! Be sure to mention DCL Dialogue! DCL DIALOGUE Originally published July, 1992 Practice What You Preach By Kevin G. Barkes Practicing safe file management and backup procedures is sort of like teaching your teenager how to drive. You lecture about using seat belts, coming to a complete stop at marked intersections, driving defensively, and all that other responsible stuff. You then blissfully ignore all those rules the next time you run out for a carton of milk or a six-pack of your favorite programming-enhancing beverage. A friend called me on a Saturday afternoon to ask if he could borrow my standalone backup TK-50. He had been doing a restore to his system disk and killed the backup for some reason. To his chagrin, he realized he had no bootable standalone system on tape, and that by aborting the restore he had trashed his system disk. "Just boot standalone off one of the other disks," I suggested. There was silence on the other end of the phone. "You mean you can put a standalone kit on non-system drives?" came the timid question. "Of course," I said, trying not to sound too condescending. "First thing you do after installing or uprgrading VMS is to build a standalone kit on every disk drive on the system. On my VAXstation I have three drives, dka100, dka200, and dka300. Once I'm certain the VMS installation is ok, I issue the commands: @SYS$UPDATE:STABACKIT DKA100: @SYS$UPDATE:STABACKIT DKA200: I also build a kit on a new TK-50 on MKA500:, my system's tape drive." "What about your third drive, dka300?" my friend asked. "Sometimes new versions of standalone backup are buggy. I always keep an older, reliable version around on one of the drives. And I always keep all old versions on tape," I explained. I drove to my friend's shop and let him use my tape to boot up and restart his restore. He promised to heed my advice and build standalone kits on every piece of supported media connected to his system. When I returned home, I decided to do some disk cleanup of my own. Of course, we all know the proper procedure is to backup before performing any kind of extensive file manipulation, right? Hah. That's for inexperienced weenies, not for smug, nationally-published columnists. I glanced quickly at the command file I used the last time I did major disk maintenance, fired it up, and went to dinner. And I returned to discover I had wiped out about 30 megabytes of critical data, as well as all of my disk-based standalone backup directories. I had forgotten I had tweaked my "standard" cleanup procedure the last time around to do some major directory whacking. The incremental restore only took 16 hours... ************ Boat Anchor Blues One of the great mysteries of computerdom is the RX-23 3.5" diskette drive included on some VAXstation models. It's virtually worthless as a backup medium, since it can store only a couple thousand blocks of data. If you try to build a standalone backup kit on it, STABACKIT.COM will misleadingly direct you through several screenfuls of information, then bomb out with an undefined symbol error. A close examination of the documentation will reveal that DEC doesn't support the RX-23 as a boot device. (Then why not just issue an "Unsupported Media" error and exit STABACKIT gracefully?) Logic would seem to dictate that DEC should provide some type of resident software to read MS-DOS diskettes in the device, since the format is primarily used for that purpose. Nope. Not unless you spend about $500 for a layered product which emulates an MS-DOS system under VMS or Ultrix. Fortunately, your RX23 doesn't have to be an anchor for a very small boat. Matthew Madison of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY has written PCX (PC Exchange), a nifty little utility which permits copying files to and from MS-DOS format diskettes under VMS using the RX23 or RX33 (5.25") diskette drives. The utility can both read and write to high density drives. Double density drives can be read only, and only high-density disks are supported on the RX33. ************** Yeah, but it's feline-proof... The TERMLOCK.COM procedure featured in April's column isn't quite as secure as advertised. While you can't control-y out of it, you can force it to exit by entering an end of file (control-z) to the READ statement. The first sharp reader to point this out was Paul M. Landry, an APD operations supervisor with Simons Eastern Consultants in Decatur, GA. The quick fix- modify the line with the READ statement to: $ READ/END=LOOP1/PROMPT="" SYS$COMMAND PWI Since my cats have failed to master multiple-keystroke control key input, the faus pax went undiscovered until publication. In their defense, I should note they are experienced mousers, although their double-clicking technique could use some polishing. ************** More Arcana Dale W. Thompson, an engineering programmer at Parsons Brinckerhoff in Fresno, CA, passes along the following tantalizing tidbit: $ INTERACTIVE = "SHOW USERS" $ Q = "'" $ 'Q'F$FAO("!ASF$MODE()",Q) Don't try this at home... *************************** Kevin G. Barkes is an independent consultant who admits to having installed Windows 3.1 on his PC, but only to use the moving starfield screen blanker. Honest. Kevin lurks on comp.os.vms and can be reached at kgbarkes@gmail.com.