Where can I get ECOs?

[chadjoan]

I've been looking around for up-to-date information on how I obtain OpenVMS ECOs.

The more modern links seem to send me to this place:

http://h20565.www2.hp.com/portal/site/hpsc/public/do/home/

And I end up here:

http://h20565.www2.hp.com/portal/site/hpsc/public/psi/swdHome/?lang=en&cc=us&sp4ts.oid=5285487

Where it says "Downloads for this product are not available through this website."

... and directs me to

https://h20392.www2.hp.com/portal/swdepot/index.do

which, as far as I can tell, doesn't mention OpenVMS at all.

In particular, I'm trying to find "TCP/IP 5.7 ECO2" mentioned here:

http://sourceforge.net/p/vms-ports/tickets/29/

with release notes here:

http://h30266.www3.hp.com/masterindex/release_notes/release_notes_00b1a42c.txt

I am running on OpenVMS v8.4 and "PRODUCT SHOW PRODUCT/FULL" tells me that I have "TCPIP V5.7-13".  I don't even know how to compare that number with "TCP/IP 5.7 ECO2", but I can tell it isn't good enough because I get "address family not supported" when I try to call bind() with an AF_UNIX (Unix domain) socket.

It would also be nice if I could find the CRTL ECO (or ACRTL? what does the A stand for?) mentioned in that one link. 

That said, I can't seem to find any of the ECOs at all.

Please help if you know where to find these!

Thanks in advance.

[Volker Halle]

Since about 3 years, OpenVMS ECOs are not publicly available anymore . You nowadays need a software contract with HP, which covers patch access.

See recent discussions in comp.os.vms newsgroup.

Patch access is (at least was on 9-OCT-2013) available via  HPSC (HP Support Center) under Download Options - Patch Management

Volker.

[Craig A Berry]

Note also that, even aside from the missing header, the Unix domain sockets didn't actually work out of the box in TCP/IP 5.7 ECO 2.  I have had private correspondence with OpenVMS Engineering in which I reported the problem and they provided test images that corrected it.  Hopefully those changes will make it into the wild eventually, but it would have to be something after 5.7 ECO 4, which I believe is still current.

The domain sockets are an emulation implemented in terms of loopback AF_INET sockets and require as-yet undocumented system-level logicals to specify the port range to use.  I'm told they will consider having default values instead of requiring the logicals but have heard nothing further in the last 7 months.

[chadjoan]

So it would use INET anyways... that could be a problem.  The reason why I want to use unix domain sockets is to send open sockets to another process, like shown here:

http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-hacks/2002-January/000292.html

or as described in the "Ancillary messages" section here:

http://linux.die.net/man/7/unix

("SCM_RIGHTS: Send or receive a set of open file descriptors from another process. [...]")

I suspect that this won't work with AF_INET sockets; not unless VMS special-cases those AF_INET sockets open to localhost and (re)contextualizes the file descriptor on the other end.

 Suppose I do have the appropriate support contract and I want to obtain an ECO anyways, what process would I go through to do so?