CERN Accelerating science

The Future of VXCERN

  Judy Richards IT/DIS

The future of VXCERN has been discussed in the last two FOCUS meetings in October and December 1997. It is clear that certain parts of the existing service must be kept running until the end of LEP data taking, in order to support activities which are dependent on VMS. However, a rather large percentage of current VMS users are using the service almost exclusively for electronic mail and news reading. These users should be encouraged to move to other alternative services. Parts of the service for which maintenance is difficult should be stopped.

Thus following the recommendations of FOCUS, we will

• stop registration of new VXCERN accounts on April 1st,
• stop the tape service and SHIFT disk access on July 31st,
• stop archiving of files on April 1st.
  N.B. Archive files will be available for restore until 2001. Users are responsible for transferring any files they want to keep to other systems.
• Since Digital will provide 'Year 2000' fixes for VMS 6.2 we will not upgrade the operating system to VMS 7.

In order to facilitate the migration of e-mail to the central MailServer, the VMS version of Pine has been installed. See the article "Pine Now Available on VXCERN" for more information.

A review of the news reading facilities on UNIX and NICE has started with the objective of improving them to provide the more popular features of VAXNEWS.

In December 1998 a major review of VXCERN accounts will be made with the experiments in order to identify those accounts which should be kept open beyond January 1st 1999.

Please note that these changes to the VXCERN service do not imply a change of policy for the maintenance of the VMS version of CERNLIB: new versions will still be available via the ASIS service.