SYSMSH@ULKYVX.BITNET.UUCP (06/07/86)
Has anyone tried this? We've got a VAXcluster consisting of an 8600 and three 750's. I'm running VMS 4.2 and am preparing to go to VMS 4.4.... Recently the engineering school got ahold of some cad/cam stations from GE/Calma that use software that only runs under VMS 4.1. Yuk. It gets access violations if you try it on 4.2. The first suggestion they came up with was building VMS 4.1 to run on the particular 750 chosen to suffer. I could keep 4.2 on the rest of the cluster but 4.4 was out of the question. Anyone tried combining 4.4 with 4.1? The problems (according to the Calma people) were an incompatibility between the 4.1 rtl's and the 4.2 rtl's.... I decided to try some slimey tactic which worked in the old RSTS and RSX days. I took the 4.1 libraries used by the Calma software and renamed them with an X on the front( Forrtl.exe -> Xorrtl.exe). I put them into sys$specific:[syslib] and installed them. Then I patched the EXE's from the Calma distributions to point at the new names rather than the 4.2 images. This works. I can run the software under 4.2 without access violations. I still need to test some of the software but it appears to work. (I also had to patch references to LIBRTL_001 in FORRTL, MTHRTL, and SORTSHR to be XIBRTL_001) Questions: Has anyone else tried this? Any caveats or things I should be aware of? The software guy from the vendor was very interested in this. Evidently lots of whining customers out there stuck at 4.1... Mark Hittinger/systems programmer iv/OCIS south center University of Louisville/Louisville, Ky 40292 sysmsh%ulkyvx.bitnet@wiscvm.wisc.edu