[Side note: This was a okay article, but the "Unix-based OpenVMS", thing sorta pissed me off. I have _no_ idea where that came from! Some of the links she gave where incorrect... I've corrected them in this posting - And even made DNS CNAME's from the incorrect locations to the correct ones!... There's several errors ("VMS became OpenVMS when ported to the Alpha", for instance). Still, its not that bad of a article... I guess... Hrmmmm] [HP World News, published by Interex, Oct. 31 issue] HP World News says You Can't Crack It or Crash It You Can't Crack It or Crash It. OpenVMS Inspires Loyal Following. By Susan B. Shor For 25 years, OpenVMS and its predecessor VMS have been running unhacked and with extremely infrequent if not non-existent reboots, or so say their very loyal followers. "When you port to VMS, you know that the operating system is going to be stable and just about bulletproof", said Champ Clark, who administers the DeathRow OpenVMS cluster (http://deathrow.vistech.net) under HP's hobbyist license program. A common refrain, said Clark and others, is "OpenVMS uptime is measured in years, not months". Clark started working on VMS as a teen. "I've always loved the handling of VMS and the security model it uses", he said. "It's incredibly stable, even under heavy loads. It's just a load of fun to use". He said he has also worked on HP-UX and other UNIX releases as well as Linux. His company, Vistech Communications (http://www.vistech.net) does networking and security. Back to DEC VMS has its roots in Digital Equipment Corp., where it ran on 32-bit VAX (Virtual Address eXtension) systems. DEC changed the name to OpenVMS when the operating system was ported to Alpha servers. The name is unrelated to open source as we think of it today. OpenVMS is a proprietary OS. HP is now porting OpenVMS to Itanium using the Alpha source code so that Alpha users will get the same improvements as those who upgrade to the 64-bit Itanium architecture. "OpenVMS has many, many extremely loyal users", Bob Blatz, Hewlett-Packard's director of OpenVMS marketing, told HP World Magazine. "It simplifies their life, simplifies their job. We're at the 25th anniversary, and it still has a long life." Through the hobbyist program, individuals can get free licenses for the UNIX-based OpenVMS and the layered software products for VMS, but they must purchase the distribution kit to get the binary code to run. The license allows non-commercial use of OpenVMS and the software. A similar program allows educational institutions to obtain a license and use the OS and software for anything other than revenue-generating functions. "It's nice to get back information around the cool things they've done", said Blatz, "but it also provides a way of having people on [their] own initiative learn about the system, and it provides a talent pool for businesses." The best estimate of OpenVMS's install base is about 411,000, with much of that in government, education, financial services, health care, manufacturing and telecommunications, according to Blatz. Those industries all require high availability and security. OpenVMS allows 96 nodes per cluster and has featured clustering-now catching on in Linux environments-since the mid-1980s. It can also handle disaster variant clustering, in which nodes can be as far apart as 500 miles. A Homegrown Community Admirers of OpenVMS, like admirers of other OSes, have their own community that helps solve problems and generate ideas. The DeathRow cluster, for instance, gives new users access to the DCL prompt and compilers as well as a bulletin board. Most in the OpenVMS community swear by the system's security, going so far as to say that it can't be hacked. According to an entry on alt.ph.uk, a discussion group set up to discuss hacking and cracking, "you'd be hard pushed to find anyone these days who has successfully hacked a fully secured, enterprise-scale VMS machine. Which is not to say it's not possible-far from it. Indeed, shell code for VMS does exist in a Digital [sic] form, out there... somewhere :-)". The VMS section concludes, "Want a challenge? Hack VMS." Others say the reason OpenVMS has not been hacked is its lack of bandwidth. Hackers want to go where the notoriety is, where they can affect the most people. Blatz said, somewhat jokingly, that he liked to keep it quiet that VMS was so secure in order to avoid waving a red flag at the hacker community. Blatz believes part of the reason OpenVMS was ahead of the curve on issues such as clustering was just plain good business practice. "We spend a lot of time talking to our customers about their requirements", he said. HP has an OpenVMS executive council and several technical advisory forums, but loyalty is born of more than a quarter decade of familiarity, Blatz said. "In addition to growing up with it, you find out how useful it is, and you're not fighting it.".