milburn@me10.lbl.gov (John Milburn) (03/11/90)
Forwarded message: The Network Services (NS) product for the Series 300 and 800 includes many individual services, one of which is Remote File Access (RFA). With release 8.0 of NS, the RFA feature of the NS product will be discontinued. RFA is being discontinued for the Series 300 and 800 because HP offers an alternativ e in Network File System (NFS) which is a defacto industry standard. This message is being sent to inform you of the steps being taken to make thi s transition as painless as possible for you and our customers. To help our customers on support migrate from RFA to NFS, we are distributing free copies of the NFS product to all those with HP Software Materials update as of February 1, 1990. This will give customers approximately eight months to modify their environments. A letter is currently being sent out to these customers through SRDO explaining this decision and telling them to look for the NFS shipment. They will also be told that if support is desired for this new service (NFS) and it was not in their software support configuration, it must be purchased. What this means is that a new Software Update Product wil l need to be added to the contract with an incremental fee (HP 9000 Software Material Update). You will want to take note of this point and discuss this with your customers. Also to assist customers and yourselves during this migration, a set of tools will be available on the patch machine in Fort Collins. These tools will consist of a netunam command that actually performs an NFS mount, a command to find all network special files on the local system and a command to synchronize all of the users and groups between a set of nodes on the network . Both the binaries and the source will be provided for these tools so that you can support them in the field. These tools will be supported by the division only on a "best effort" basis until HP-UX 9.0 is released. The availability of the source code should minimize the impact of this limited support on you. A white paper will also be available on the patch machine that will explain these tools, the differences between RFA and NFS, and the steps to migrate from RFA to NFS. Everything will be on the patch machine by February 1, 1990 . Please forward this message on to any account SEs in your area who have customers on support for RFA. Thank you. Best regards, Chuck Morse CND Technical Marketing JEMilburn@lbl.gov ...!ucbvax!lbl.gov!JEMilburn