[comp.sys.hp] RFA Obsolescence

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





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