Path: stratagy.com!no-spam-allowed-here Newsgroups: comp.sys.stratus References: Message-ID: <20010824_180000_I-S_HOWTO@list.stratagy.com> X-No-Archive: yes Expires: Fri, 31 Sep 2001 23:59:59 GMT Organization: Info-Stratus mailing list Date: Fri, 24 Aug 2001 18:00:00 -0500 From: "Richard S. Shuford" Subject: IS:: How To Use Info-Stratus (periodic posting) Greetings, Stratus community: This the periodic "How To" message, which tells how to use Info-Stratus and "comp.sys.stratus". I send this message out periodically. If you forget to save a copy, you can retrieve a recent version of it from: http://www.cs.utk.edu/~shuford/terminal/i-s.howto.periodic.txt ...RSS -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- Welcome to the Info-Stratus Internet mailing list and the related Usenet newsgroup "comp.sys.stratus". We are pleased to have you here, as a reader of either Info-Stratus or "comp.sys.stratus". You can use Info-Stratus to exchange information and experience with a community of other professionals who use, program, or maintain Stratus systems. In Info-Stratus, we will entertain questions and answers about any of the Stratus operating environments. Historically, the most frequent topics concern the reliable transaction-oriented VOS operating system or software running under VOS. However, any computing environment supported by Stratus or Lucent/Ascend is fair game, and hardware issues are of interest to all. The Info-Stratus mailing list is accredited by the Stratagy User Group, with technical facilities provided by Stratus Technologies. The bidirectional gateway between the Info-Stratus electronic mailing list and the "comp.sys.stratus" Usenet newsgroup allows both readers of the newsgroup and subscribers of the mailing list to see same messages. If you want to receive messages from the mailing list, you have to personally subscribe to it, by the procedure given below, whereas the newsgroup is available without special arrangement, from just about any Usenet news server. (Usually, the turnaround time for a message is shorter in the mailing list.) As the Internet continues to attract the attention of people with nefarious or foolish intentions, and since we are trying to use the Internet for a serious purpose, we have to take certain defensive measures against the nonsense and clutter. In Info-Stratus, only persons actually registered with the mailing list are allowed to send messages by email to the list subscribers. Also, messages from the Usenet newsgroup are examined by a human before they are sent to the mailing list. (Sometimes this causes a delay before a message from comp.sys.stratus gets relayed.) <>--<>--<>--<>--<>--<>--<>--<>--<>--<>--<>--<>--<>--<>--<>--<>--<>--<> What if you want to sell something to the Stratus community? Or what if you want to recruit a person to fill a job? If you are a vendor of a Stratus-related product, please note: The mailing list and newsgroup are intended as a users' discussion forum. Therefore, we generally do not want to see unsolicited pure product advertisements. However, if somebody sends a message to the list, asking, for instance, if software to control treacle-well pumps can run on a Stratus, and you sell such software, please feel free to post a message to say so (which may briefly describe the software's features). Most of the vendors of specialized Stratus- environment products do read Info-Stratus or comp.sys.stratus. At the present time, I am still maintaining a page of links to Stratus-related sites and pages on the Worldwide Web: http://www.cs.utk.edu/~shuford/terminal/stratus.html If you are a vendor, you can include the URL of your home page at the bottom of discussion messages you may post to the mailing list. RECRUITMENT ADS: Our guideline for how often a recruitment ad may be posted to the mailing list is pretty much 1P/1M/1J--that is, one Posting per one Month per one Job. If you have more than one Stratus-related job opening, then you could post more than once in a month. (If you want to list multiple openings in a posting, that's fine. If you list 5 job openings in a message and then send the identical message 5 times, that's NOT fine.) If 30 days have gone by with the job unfilled, then there is no trouble about posting about it a 2nd time. <>--<>--<>--<>--<>--<>--<>--<>--<>--<>--<>--<>--<>--<>--<>--<>--<>--<> Things to do during/before sending a message to Info-Stratus (or to the newsgroup): Please set your email client to send PLAIN TEXT messages. Not all the participants use GUI mail clients; if you want what you say to be understood, you should send it in the language everybody can read. Also, there is rarely any real benefit when the email client sends both the plain text plus an attachment containing an HTML-encoded rendition of the mssage. MIME-encoded attachments (not containing your discussion comments) are no longer forbidden, but there should be some discernible reason to attach them, and if they are bigger than practical size, your message may be delayed or dropped. If you are using Microsoft Exchange to send email, please configure it to NOT include WINMAIL.DAT attachments, which are annoying to many subscribers. Please write a meaningful "Subject" header. Remember, people may want to read your message from the archive years from now. It will be difficult for somebody looking for help with VOS command macros to know that a certain message thread from 1996 would be helpful, since most of the subject lines say Subject: Re: Bizarre!!! If you want to modify the subject of a message thread, there is a convention to do it. Here is a subject line that got mutated: Subject: periodic HW maintenance (was Re: IS:: cleaning tape drives) The 'IS::' token is automatically inserted so that subscribers to the mailing list can easily identify Info-Stratus messages. ............................................................................ How you pose a question or make a comment in the discussion depends on how you read the forum. (1) If you are reading "comp.sys.stratus", you use whatever article-posting mechanism is provided by your Usenet software. If you need background information on the customs, history, and technology of Usenet, point your Web browser at this URL: http://web.presby.edu/~nnqadmin/nnq/ (2) If you are a member of the mailing list, post your messages to other people throughout the world by sending an email message to the "list" address Info-Stratus@LIST.STRATAGY.COM All authenticated messages which are sent to the above address are reflected back out to each of the Info-Stratus subscribers. --> WARNING: At present, the mailing-list software uses a "Reply-To:" header that directs responses back to the mailing list. If you use the "reply" function of your email program, you'd better be writing something you don't mind the whole world looking at. If you want to send personal greetings to somebody, use your mailer's "send" or "compose" command (or equivalent) and generate a private message thread outside the mailing-list discussion. ............................................................................ Perhaps you have been subscribing to the mailing list and now decide to read the messages in the newsgroup, instead. Any request to change your subscription should be sent to: majordomo@LIST.STRATAGY.COM ^^^^^^^^^ If you want to STOP receiving messages from the mailing list, send a message containing: unsubscribe Info-Stratus to Majordomo. (Put "unsubscribe" in the BODY of the message. The Subject line is ignored.) If you want to begin receiving messages from the mailing list, send a message body containing just: subscribe Info-Stratus to . Unless you have made special arrangements, your must post your messages to Info-Stratus from the SUBSCRIBED email address. ............................................................................ An archive of all messages that are sent to the Info-Stratus mailing list is automatically kept by the list-host computer. The monthly archive files are available for anonymous FTP retrieval from ftp://ftp.stratus.com/pub/info-stratus/ (Alas, as of this writing the archives are not complete.) There is also an archive of the newsgroup comp.sys.stratus, containing mostly the same messages, at ftp://ftp.stratus.com/pub/vos/comp.sys.stratus/news.html It is also possible to search Usenet archives at http://groups.google.com/ Thanks for your interest in Info-Stratus. ...Richard Shuford Info-Stratus List Administrator shuford(at)list.stratagy.com -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --