Change to Patch services effective September 18, 2010

[Willem Grooters]

Q: Why is HP making this change?
A: This change brings HP in alignment with accepted industry practices for software patch delivery ....

Alignmant fault.

Accepted Industry practice is:
* Got a license? you can get updates for free (Microsoft, numerous software vendors
* Totally free for everyone (Linux distributions).

So quite the opposite.

Willem

[Paul Jerrom]

The most annoying thing as far as I am concerned is the removal of FTP support. I support sites where I simply do not have browser/PC access - so I cannot download patches to a PC and FTP them onto the VMS server. So now I'll have to burn a CD somehow and travel to site. What a backward step.

[Doug Phillips]

> ...burn a CD...

Or, download the patches to someplace that you can FTP into;

Or, push them to the VMS sites using whatever remote connection tool you have there.

At some remote sites, FTP is not running and I use Reflection or Kermit to upload files to them. PITA, but better than traveling around the country or doing a bunch of mailings.

[The Brit]

My personal gripe about taking away the FTP functionality is that I will have to pass the patches through some other system instead of dropping them directly onto my OpenVMS system.

One has to conclude that the rumoured "death wish" of HP towards OpenVMS may be more than just a rumour.

Dave.

[Ian Miller.]

I wonder if something creative could be done with wget to fetch the kits.

[Steven Schweda]

> I wonder if something creative could be
> done with wget to fetch the kits.

Perhaps. Probably not, if the Web interface
relies on JavaScript. I haven't seen a spec
explaining how this scheme would (does?)
work, and, not having "an active HP support
agreement that includes Software Updates
linked to [my] ITRC profile", I can't easily
run an experiment which might reveal what
would be required.

I have done simple Web form submission using
wget, and I gather that it can handle some
more complex stuff like certificates and
cookies, but I haven't tried to use any of
those fancy features.

[twhjr]

It seems to me that many years ago there was a character cell browser for VMS? Does anyone remember this or is my memory and old age playing tricks?

[Rick Dyson]

Lynx. Available for lots of platforms. But I bet it would not work in this case as the new HTML protocols, javascript, etc would all get in the way.

rick

[labadie_1]

Install Python for your user with the LD devices
http://www.vmspython.org/DownloadAndInstallationPython

and you have mechanize listed in the modules available,
"
mechanize dev 1-MAY-2009
http://wwwsearch.sourceforge.net/mechanize/

Stateful programmatic web browsing in Python, after Andy Lester's Perl module WWW::Mechanize
"

and use mechanize, which lets you go to a site, fill a form with a user and password, click on the second link, on the link name abc...

You have many examples on the website.

You will need either an
import re
in your Python program, to use the regular expressions, or use BeautifulSoup, which is included too, and works on "bad" html, xml...
version 3.07a of BeautifulSoup is available, see the website
http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/

[Graham Burley]

> Perhaps. Probably not, if the Web interface relies on JavaScript.

I was unable to browse the Patch database with JavaScript disabled as the version selection field was not functional.