From: Ed Wilts [ewilts@winternet.com]
Sent: Tuesday, June 08, 1999 8:55 PM
To: Info-VAX@Mvb.Saic.Com
Subject: V7.2 bugginess

Is it just me or are other people finding V7.2 more buggy than most
previous VMS releases?  The kind of stuff I'm finding is more annoying
than critical, but to have to find workarounds to basic things that used
to work is looking likely to prevent me upgrading my production cluster
to V7.2.  If Engineering can't even get the simple stuff right, I'm
scared to see what they've broken in the important pieces.

Some examples:

$ show proc/id=	
If the process is on an Alpha V7.2 node, you'll get a insufficient priv
error even if fully priv'ed, assuming you're not on the node that you're
invoking this on (the bug isn't present on a Vax).  This was
acknowledged by Engineering a month ago, with still no fix.  The
documented workaround is to use SYSMAN, another buggy application, and
one which requires more privs than show process does.

Sysman.  Profile default directory has changed, breaking many of our
current command procedures.

Sysman.  Occasionally seems to drop privs.  One minute you've got privs,
the next minute you don't.  

Backup.  Broke /journal. Workaround is to use /list, increasing the size
of your logs 4-fold.  For us, that would cost us 400MB per day, and we
typically about 30 sets of logs, so we'd have to buy 12GB of disk just
to workaround this bug (and since all our data is shadowed between data
centers, double this to 24GB).  I've seen several DNSlink articles
acknowledging the bug, but no fix in sight.

Opcom.  Without pre-releases of IO_ROUTINES and IO_ROUTINES_MON, we were
looking at OPERATOR.LOG files filled with errors.  The new executables
aren't part of a patch kit yet, with no release date even estimated.

I've been running VMS since V2.4, and initial testing on V7.2 for us
seems to rank this release this up there with 4.0, and that's not rating
this very favorably.

Are other people finding lots of little things, big things, or are
people generally not comfortable putting up 7.2 at all yet?

I'll be in Providence for Decus, and I'll go hunt down a few Engineers
while I'm there (you've been warned :-)) but I want to start a
discussion here before I go.

Cheers,
	.../Ed
mailto:ewilts@winternet.com