Greetings, Stratus community: This the periodic "How To" message, last revised 1998-07-24. This message deals with administrative concerns. The other periodic message contains a collection of frequently useful facts about Stratus technology. I send this message out periodically, but you should SAVE a copy--eventually you will NEED to know some fact in it. ...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-supported operating environments. Historically, the most frequent topics concern the reliable transaction-oriented VOS operating system or software running under VOS. However, any Stratus-supported software environment is fair game, and hardware issues are of interest to all. 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.) In these final years of the twentieth century, a high level of nonsense infests the Internet. 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. (That human is currently me. Therefore, if I'm busy or travelling, there may be some delay before a comp.sys.stratus message gets sent to the mailing list.) The Info-Stratus mailing list is now operated under the auspices of the Stratagy User Group, with technical facilities provided by Stratus Computer, Inc. (Lenoir-Rhyne College is no longer hosting the mailing list.) $_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_ 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 pre-announced times during the year, Info-Stratus may sponsor an Electronic Exhibition. During such a period, product vendors may post unsolicited advertisements to the mailing list, subject to certain limits. The most recent one was conducted during May 1998. Given the discussion role of the newsgroup and mailing list, there is a legitimate ongoing need for Stratus-environment vendors to display their wares. At the present time, I am still maintaining a page of links to Stratus-related sites and pages on the World Wide Web: access my links via this URL (Uniform Resource Locator): http://www.cs.utk.edu/~shuford/terminal/stratus.html (Note that you will need a Web-browser program to read Web pages.) If you are a VENDOR, and if you have a Web page somewhere on the Internet, and if you want a link (a clickable hypertext pointer) from this page, send me a request (including your URL) and I'll consider putting your link on that page, subject to constraints of time, resources, and propriety. It is a good idea to include the URL of your home page at the bottom of any discussion messages you may post to the mailing list. (I'm not certain how long I'll be able to maintain my page.) 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. ............................................................................ When you send a message to Info-Stratus (or to the newsgroup), please... do NOT send attached MIME-encoded or binary word-processor documents, or GIF images, to the mailing list. (In particular, be careful of your settings in Microsoft Exchange and the various Netscape mail agents.) Despite the wide use of fancy graphical Internet-access tools, many readers of Info-Stratus get their mail via cantankerous email gateways and read their messages in pure ASCII on character-cell screens. On some systems, most of the headers of your message will disappear. And some mail readers cannot automatically wrap lines in a paragraph: the line may be truncated to the first 79 characters! On the other hand, we DO ask that you use a "subject" line that describes the content of your message. Descriptive "subject" headers are valuable to people, both when they first get a message in their inbox, and also years later, when people are searching through archived messages. 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 "Re: Bizarre!!!" In case you see that subject lines are no longer descriptive, you can use the old Internet "was" convention for mutating the subject of a continuing message thread. For example, if several messages had a subject line: Subject: Re: IS:: cleaning tape drives and the conversation had drifted onto the general topic of scheduling periodic hardware maintenance of all types, you could helpfully set the subject of your next message to be: Subject: periodic HW maintenance (was Re: IS:: cleaning tape drives) ^^^ ............................................................................ 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 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: 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, not the subject line.) If you want to begin receiving messages from the mailing list, send a message body containing just: SUBSCRIBE Info-Stratus to . Observe that the address no longer contains the "-request" suffix. (If you are an employee of Stratus Computer, Inc., you should use the corporate internal procedures instead of the above.) Unless you have made special arrangements, your must post your messages to Info-Stratus from the subscribed address. ............................................................................ NOTE: If your email system is continually malfunctioning so that messages bounce back to the administrative mailbox, I may have to drop you from the mailing list. You can still read "comp.sys.stratus" until the system is repaired. ............................................................................ Some readers like to employ a "vacation" program to respond automatically when they are unable to read email for some interval. The Majordomo software contains features for preventing disastrous Mail Loops to the entire list, but a single automatic response may be sent to the person who posted the message to the list. ............................................................................ 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 will soon be made available for anonymous FTP retrieval from ftp://ftp.stratus.com/pub/info-stratus/ There is also an archive of the newsgroup comp.sys.stratus, with 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://www.dejanews.com/ Thanks for your interest in Info-Stratus. ...Richard Shuford Info-Stratus List Administrator : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : :