Month: September 2017

Certificates
The job checking whether certificates need to be renewed does it job: No issues on the secured sites, but still on the main one. Will have top ask, because otherwise the expected https-connection will not work properly… It is weird because it has worked before, but it may be related to changes in eiter WASD_ONFIG_AUTH or WASD_CONFIG_MAP – but these have been minimal. Or WASD_CONFIG_SERVICE ma have a bad spec? It seems Ok, though…

CIFS
Required for the new development environment using NXTWARE: The old PWS (Daphne) is set up to be the scapegoat for testing, and Java and GNV are now both installed – but the product requires Samba (CIFS) as well to access the files to handle. IO have versions 1.1 in my store, but the latest I know of to be available is version 1.2 – ECO1. To locate the download site proved a search for several hours, and once found, it leads to a location of which the browsers tell me it does not exist. Or is unreachable. asked at on forum at HPE but got no reply (yet).
Asked on the OpenVMS SIG and got a reply within minutes: ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/openvms/private/CIFS/. Use that URL in Chrome, because Edge won’t find it:

Hmmm…can’t reach this page
Try this

Make sure you’ve got the right web address: ftp://ftp.hp.com

Search for “ftp://ftp.hp.com” on Bing

Refresh the page

Details

Error Code: INET_E_OBJECT_NOT_FOUND

and using a tool like FileZille won’t find this CIFS folder on the site.

Anyway, got the files now, for both Alpha and Itanium. so I’ll install then somewhere this week.

Certificates expired
This morning, when accessing the webmail site, I got a message before login that there was an issue with the certificate. Chrome at least showed me what: the certificate was expired”. Which is well possible since Mark Daniel had installed certificates half June, which is now 3 months ago.
But the system should have taken care of that, since the tool he has created is installed and configured conform the documents supplied. So I looked at the log files and found two things:

It hasn’t been running before last reboot (Duh. No need since that certificate was fine)

Now it runs, it encounters an error on the main site and stops.

I’ve done a few things to find out what caused the problem, didn’t succeed. It wasn’t possible to create a mail using the web-application due to the certificate problems. Finally, I created new certificates as it were initialization, changed the configuration file referring the new certificates (which are now site-specific) and that solved the problem for the secures sites. However, checking the main site still gives a problem, so be sorted out.

New development environment in the making
Over a year ago, I had the opportunity to attend a workshop by ECube showing their Eclipse plugins so you can use a normal PC to do development om VMS. It requires some installation on the VMA side: Java, GNV, Samba and NxtWare server (their product).
I chose my old PWS (now at 512 Mb memory) as a server – small, too small to run the NetBeans solution of HP (tried that several years ago: no success), but according Kevin Barnes of ECube, big enough to handle the load on Nxtware-remote; It would take some time to startup, but otherwise, it would be fine.

Well, I tried at that time but I didn’t get Java to run at all.

Yesterday, I found out why: Installation wasn’t complete. Well, installation was, but the environment needs to be started as well – and that part was missing.
GNV was already installed (may need an update).

Today I installed the client side: Java and Eclipse. The newest version (Oxygen) offers specific environments, getting a base setup however is put behind “Advanced” option. Guessing that’s what I need, I installed just the base version; and next the Nxtware plugins. These do not yet show up but it might be caused by a missing client license.

Yet, I need some more software on the VMS side: CIFS (AKA Sambe). It may already be installed but not yet configured, I do have the installation files but I’m not sure of their version – I need to get the latest from the HPE side. Looking around there for quite a while, found the location but the links to download the .ZIPEXE files (self-extracting zip-files…) refer to ftp-HP.COM sites – no longer available.
Pushed a question on the HP support forum to get an answer. Until I get that answer, I’m stuck..

A bit later
I examined the logfiles last Saturday but I’ve been too busy with other things that needed to be done at home, so the results of the maintenance job could only now be published.
PMAS statistics for August
Total messages    :   4346 = 100.0 o/o
DNS Blacklisted   :      0 =    .0 o/o (Files:  0)
Relay attempts    :    244 =   5.6 o/o (Files: 30)
Accepted by PMAS  :   4102 =  94.3 o/o (Files: 31)
  Handled by explicit rule
         Rejected :   3234 =  78.8 o/o (processed),  74.4 o/o (all)
         Accepted :    205 =   4.9 o/o (processed),   4.7 o/o (all)
  Handled by content
        Discarded :    387 =   9.4 o/o (processed),   8.9 o/o (all)
     Quarantained :    262 =   6.3 o/o (processed),   6.0 o/o (all)
        Delivered :     14 =    .3 o/o (processed),    .3 o/o (all)
Relay attempts were low as well: 178 on 09-Aug, 40 on 20-Aug, All the same: Address 23.254.215.227, using a fake addresss, to the same recepinet 1029mandaditos@gmail.com. The originating addrees’s WHOIS:

Description: Hostwinds LLC
Netname: futbolito Network
%rwhois V-1.5: 003fff:00 rwhois.hostwinds.com (by Network Solutions, Inc. V-1.5.9.5)

(There is more info but I don’t want to publish it here)

located in the US (Tulsa), but according WHOIS some Mexican organisation (or user?) is involved as well.
Of course, the abuse address has been notified.

This morning, there has been a short network problem in the area so all traffic (Internet and everything that runs over the Internet (inclusing TV and phone) have been off for about an hour and a half. I noticed it because no access could be made at all, not even with the router. But after it was restored, I found out that the automated certificate-renewal doesn’t run. Ths should be fixed before the OpenVMS bootcamp (within a few weeks) – so there is another job to be done…