Change to Patch services effective September 18, 2010

[Jeremy Begg]

I don't think this is any part of a sinister plot for the demise of OpenVMS. I do however think it's very annoying and the removal of FTP access unfairly penalises those of us who ARE paying for OpenVMS support.

September 18 falls during the OpenVMS Bootcamp. I will be raising this with HP OpenVMS Engineering -- and I hope everyone else at the Bootcamp will do the same.

Regards,
Jeremy Begg

[Ian Miller.]

Note the following news article with quotes from here

http://3000newswire.blogs.com/3000_newswire/2010/08/hps-customers-push-back-on-paid-patches.html

[Chris Scheers]

Does anyone know if this change will also lock up firmware updates?

[Dennis Handly]

>Chris: Does anyone know if this change will also lock up firmware updates?

That would be my reading for patches from the ITRC. Unless you need hardware enablement (HWE) patch bundles or patches and products for the new HP Integrity Superdome 2.

[Richard Jordan]

Has anyone received any useful reply from HP on any queries or complaints sent to them about this?

Outside of automatic acknowledgments, and a marked increase in irrelevant emails from them (for the last few days I'm getting a lot of consumer product emails from HP, which I was not receiving before) I've heard nothing back.

[Ian Miller.]

VMS, HPUX and other customer feedback ( including a pointer to this thread) is being collected and passed on upwards in HP.

Do keep sending your feedback to your HP Account Manager, VMS Ambassador etc.

[cnb]

:(

I've yet to receive any response (other than the auto-reply) to my email inquiry about this change and I have a support contract!

Not too happy about the lack of response.

I did get Greg Ivans (HP-UX HWE Prg. Mgr.) to respond over in the HP-UX forum, when questioning firmware access.

Waiting for the other shoe to drop...


Rgds,

-cnb

[Ian Miller.]

re firmware.

"The current phase of this Patch entitlement change does not cover PSP, BiOS, and Firmware. These will evaluated in future phases of the program. "

re ISV, AllianceOne access and hobbyist access - no news so far.

[Richard W Hunt]

This hits me in a different and entirely unpredictable way. I have had this ITRC account literally for a couple of DECADES after a support countract that existed back when I first came on board to the Dept. of Defense site. Our site contract lapsed during the ordeal after Hurricane Katrina forced us to an alternate site 600+ miles away. Then we moved back and I stopped dealing with the s/w service folks directly for a long time after that.

I have no clue on Earth as to what support contracts are tied to this account. I know we have a contract, but don't know how to tie it to my ITRC account - because I'm so far down on the totem pole that I don't even know who is my official support POC. Someone deep in the bowels of government might know that, but I don't. (And if you think that's a cr@ppy situation, remember ... I really DID say "bowels of government.")

I've already been forced by my own site's security to use a Microsoft browser to download patches anyway because of the presence of "For Official Use Only" data on my system. The firewalls won't let me directly hit the FTP site via OpenVMS. So I can't say anything about the "Browser to get patches" stuff. I therefore can't lay blame for that on HP.

[Rob Leadbeater]

Hi,

According to the other thread regarding this, over in the HP-UX forum, this change has been delayed by a week...

http://forums.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=1444471

Cheers,

Rob