Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!pacbell!att-ih!ihnp4!ihlpf!nevin1 From: nevin1@ihlpf.ATT.COM (00704a-Liber) Newsgroups: comp.os.vms Subject: Re: Help us defend against VMS! Message-ID: <4055@ihlpf.ATT.COM> Date: 18 Mar 88 23:01:04 GMT References: <2814@enea.se> Reply-To: nevin1@ihlpf.UUCP (00704a-Liber,N.J.) Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories - Naperville, Illinois Lines: 81 Well, Erland, I guess I get to argue with you in another group :-) :-)!! First off, my background: I have been both a general user and system administrator on both Unix and VMS systems. Currently, I prefer Unix, but I think that that is just a personal preference. I really don't want to add fuel to the OS war, but I don't like it when people make points through invalid arguments. In article <2814@enea.se> sommar@enea.UUCP(Erland Sommarskog) writes: . .Now, watch it here. A Unix system comes with a bunch of compilers .that's true. VMS does not. But what about the quality of the compilers? .My experience of Unix compilers restricts to the Fortran and Pascal .compiler that comes with 4.3 BSD on our VAX. The code they produce .have a speed which hardly is acceptable for procduction. And if you .want other languages, Ada for instance, you'll have to buy that .separately also for Unix. Come on, give it some time. Until recently, Unix was not even considered for doing anything but development. And not all VMS compilers are all that great, either. The Modula-2 compiler I used did SEVEN passes!! Nor have I ever seen a VMS Pascal comppiler that works nearly as well as Turbo Pascal for PCs! Is this a fault of the OS?? I think not. As more and more demands are made better and better compilers will be written. ..The claim that Unix is somehow less secure than VMS is a red herring. . .Ah, good televangelist preaching! . .Seriuosly: The VMS privilieges makes it possible to just use those .you need at the moment. And for giving away: Very few students ever .need more than NETMBX and TMPMBX. They should have *very* good reasons .for getting any other. Sorry, but the VMS privileges do NOT make it possible to give out only just what is needed. When you give a student NETMBX and TMPMBX privileges, exactly what do they have access to that they didn't have before?? When you give out privileges, you give people access to a whole bunch of things, and not necessarily just the stuff they need access to. For instance, create an account to allow someone to make full backups of the hard drive onto a tape device, and see how much more access to the system he/she has. When I was a student using VMS (before I was a VMS system administrator), there were certain things we weren't supposed to be able to do, such as copy files among students (they disconnected SET FILE /PROT), print help files, and boost our priority (boy, do you get in trouble when you run at priority 15 and you get caught :-)); yet I managed to do all these things with only NETMBX and TMPMBX. And I wasn't even trying to break security! VMS seems to promote security thru obscurity!! Many VMS sys admins feel their system is secure because they can't think of ways to break it. Unix sysadmins, however, can understand their security problems because they can learn about how the OS works. However, most users have access to this same information, which means that the security issues really have to be thought all the way out. To say that VMS is more secure than Unix or vice-versa is ridiculous. They just have different security issues, that's all. .And this brings us on to another issue which Barry does not mention: .Unix may have some clever tricks, but it's user interface is really .arcane. One-letter options is certainly not state-of-the-art. One letter options are not really part of the OS user interface, per-se. Each command handles it's own arguments (although there are standard system calls such as getopt() so that some sort of consistency can be maintained). The user interface of Unix is really the shell (Bourne, Korn, csh, vsh, etc.). And if you want to write your own interface, go do it! It's not that hard. Try doing it for VMS!! If you really want to continue the war on VMS vs Unix, you had better come up with some much better arguments!! What I would really like to see, however, is how to incorporate the best of both OSs into a new OS (this probably belongs in another newsgroup, however). -- _ __ NEVIN J. LIBER ..!ihnp4!ihlpf!nevin1 (312) 510-6194 ' ) ) "The secret compartment of my ring I fill / / _ , __o ____ with an Underdog super-energy pill." / (_