Xenophobia is not the same as lack of experience. The VMS development team in the USA is extinct. The guys in India are first rate software engineers (they ought to be to find their way in the VMS codebase) but their perspective on how the os should behave and what they observe is markedly different. Read the discussion in comp.os.vms on changes in the DIRECTORY command. The Indian team made changes that are probably more in line with newer commands but broke old code that had been stable for decades. The bottomline is that I expect my alphas to stay on 8.3, probably as long as the VAXes will remain on 7.3. I have no IA64 systems (luckily, reading Sampsas problems :-) so no ideas there other than that IA64/VMS 8.3 is the production quality release at this point in time. Verzonden vanaf mijn draadloze BlackBerry -toestel -----Original Message----- From: Mark Wickens <mark at wickensonline.co.uk> Sender: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE Date: Wed, 24 Aug 2011 18:54:03 To: <hecnet at Update.UU.SE> Reply-To: hecnet at Update.UU.SESubject: Re: [HECnet] DECUS/freeware archive On 24/08/11 18:28, hvlems at zonnet.nl wrote: Mark, If you still have access to the HP patch database then I'd suggest these OS versions: VAX/VMS 7.3 Alpha/VMS. 7.3. 7.3-2 8.3 8.4 IA64/VMS. 8.3 8.4 TCP/IP : all versions -please- The reasoning behind the VMS versions is simple. The AXP variants are the "stable" ones, though I have my doubts regarding 8.4. I guess that 7.3-2 and 8.3 cover a substantial fraction of all hobbyist sites. Hobbyists with a VAX run everything for fun but if the VAX is still used for serious work it'll run 7.3. I'm clueless about what is en vogue in Itanium land. Personally I'd like to install the latest patches for the IP stack. Hans Hans, I'll bear your comments in mind thanks... When I spoke to Stephen Hoffman about which version of Alpha OpenVMS to install I was told to stick to 8.3 unless I wanted to get into a large amount of patching. I think the quality of 8.4 probably reflects the wholesale move of OpenVMS development from the USA to India. Please don't take that as xenophobia - merely a reflection on the loss of a good deal of long-time VMS talent. Hopefully future releases will benefit from the increasing knowledge of the new team. IA64 VMS, AFAIK, is a similar scenario. Regards, Mark