LEICHTER@VENUS.YCC.YALE.EDU ("Jerry Leichter ", LEICHTER-JERRY@CS.YALE.EDU) (06/23/88)
I am a novice VAXnotes user and responsible for installing and
maintaining this beast. We have version 1.2. Having played with it
some time and having carefully read the Guide to VAXnotes and the
Command Dictionary, some questions still remain:
- I have not found a way to delete notes based on their creation date,
neither is there a method to automatically set an expiration date
on every note at creation time.
That makes it rather nasty to get rid of old notes.
There is no way to do this. In general, the way I've seen this dealt with is
to start up a new conference when the old one gets too full. A good procedure
is:
a) On day X, announce in a topic in the original conference that this
will happen on day X+n. Create the new conference as
"NEW_name", and do a SET CONFERENCE on the announcement note
to point to it. In its first topic, include an explanation of
what the new conference is here, and use a SET CONFERENCE to
point back to the original file.
b) On day X+n, mark the old conference read-only. Optional: Copy
ongoing topics to the new conference. It's rare that there
are more than a couple, so this is no big deal. Usually
conferences with a lot of ongoing topics aren't hurt much
by losing old context - something new will come up.
c) On day X+n+m, change the name of the old conference to "OLD_name",
and the name of the new one to just "name".
Modify the SET CONFERENCE markers to point to the files under
their new names.
People who miss the changeover by not looking at the file during the entire
n+m day period may get a bit confused, since they will read the new conference
with their old SEEN map. The cleanest way to avoid this is to use unique
names: Add a version identification to the file name ("BOATS_V1", "BOATS_V2"
and so on) so that the name never changes over the life of the conference.
Anyone coming in late will find themselves reading an old version.
Eventually, they'll get to the explanatiion of the change, with its
SET CONFERENCE; they can then do an immediate SELECT. To make things easier
for them, you should enter a forwarding note as the absolute last thing before
setting the conference read-only - and at the same time set the conference
announcement to explain what is happening.
This sounds complex, but it's not hard to do and ultimately gives you better
control over your conferences than raw deletion of old notes. Some old notes
are important - there may be references to them in recent notes, for example.
It's difficult to deal with completely automatically. This way, you can keep
an archive copy, either on-line or eventually on tape, all nicely organized
for later reference.
- One of the features I expect from a conferencing system is to
automatically forward VMSmail messages to a conference.
For example I would like all INFO-VAX incoming mail to go to a
INFO-VAX read-only conference.
I have not seen such a possibility in VAXnotes.
There's nothing built in to do this, but it's not hard to accomplish using
DELIVER (which comes with PMDF and I think is also available from DECUS).
Or you could even have a batch job that runs periodically to extract the
mail to an account and enter it into a conference.
- Security is very very poor.
There are no installed privileged images. Everything you can do
in VAXnotes, you can do at DCL-level, or even more.
A conference you create for general write access may be completely
overwritten with the DCL WRITE command, but you only want to
allow write access in VAXnotes.
This is FALSE. Please read the system manager's documentation more closely.
There are two ways to set up VAXnotes: "Open" or "secure" (not the words from
the documentation). If you set it up as "open", the VAXnotes user agent, when
accessing a conference on the current node, simply opens it. This is fast,
but as you note, insecure: The conference files have to be accessible to
everyone. If you set it up as "secure", conferences will NOT be accessible to
the world; they will be owned by the account the VAXnotes server runs under,
and accessible ONLY through the server. Even local accesses will go through
DECnet to the server.
Is there anybody out there who has suggestions about what I've missed
(hopefully) or with experiences with different conferencing systems
which have the facilities VAXnotes apparently lacks ?
-- Jerry