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HP Operating Systems Software Unix IT

HP Plots New Courses with HP-UX/Tru64 133

Uberhacker.Com writes "HP has given up on trying to bring key parts of Compaq/DEC's Tru64 operating system into HP-UX. They had once planned for the Tru64 goodies to arrive this year and made a big deal of this quick turnaround when it first acquired Compaq. Ironically, HP also announced today that it is expanding its Alpha RetainTrust program for Tru64 UNIX customers." The linked article also notes that HP has decided that it will proceed forward with purchasing some of the technology from Veritas.
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HP Plots New Courses with HP-UX/Tru64

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  • it was a doomed project in the first place, they had no way of making it
  • My question to the world is this: where were you on the day when HP gave up on trying to bring key parts of Compaq/DEC's Tru64 operating system into HP-UX?

    Some Guy: "Ummm.....uhhh......what?"
  • ...some of us could have some fun again!
    • by johnalex ( 147270 ) on Monday December 06, 2004 @10:05AM (#11007377) Homepage
      "Bring back?" We just installed a new HP Alpha DS 25: 2 1 GH processors, 2 GB RAM, a ton of hard drive space, OpenVMS 7.3.2. It's replacing a DEC (yes, a Digital) Alpha 2100. Wow, it's sweet. I just tried a job that once took all night on the old machine run in less than 15 minutes on the new one. Our month-end processing that once took 4 hours can run in around 40 minutes.

      OpenVMS is still around, it's still running, and it's better than ever. I suppose the question is what will happen when the Alphas die.
      • I think I read somewhere that HP's plans where to run all VMS related processing in an emulator on Itanium.

      • I am using a dell precision 750 with dual xeon 2.4G, 1.5G RAM, I wonder if it is at all possible, how fast it will take for your job to run on my workstation?
      • I wish I shared your enthusiasm. While I know its still around (we installed a DS20E in the lab this year) and many of our clients use it, HP's committment to the Alpha line is gone, and it's committment to VMS (OpenVMS) is only to ease the yelling of a handful of large federal accounts. I do know how easy it is to sleep when responsible for VMS systems, and I hate seeing it go, but without a vendor seeing this as a strategic product it's not going to happen.

        I don't blame HP completely, as the DEC-Compaq
  • Follow Sun's business model and benefit us all!
  • Hardly surprising (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Doctor Memory ( 6336 ) on Monday December 06, 2004 @09:50AM (#11007283)
    HP-UX has always been clunky, trying to splice in some DNA from a totally unrelated (and more technically advanced) version of Unix was a pretty tall order. They probably would have had better luck porting Tru64 over to PA-RISC and trying to merge in the bits they really wanted from HP-UX.
    • Well, porting Tru64 to PA-RISC would have been silly because they're killing that off, too.

      Of course, I think they should have just kept the fucking Alpha line...
    • by Viol8 ( 599362 )
      OSF/1 , Tru64 , [insert its name this week] might have been advanced once back in the mid 90s but once compaq got hold of it things started to stagnate feature wise compared to other unixes (probably because some pissant PC company didn't really have a clue what to do when faced with "real" machines and heavyweight 24/7 uptime customers). People knock HP-UX but personally I find it pretty good, plus the hardware is a damn site more reliable than Suns sorry offerings.
      • People knock HP-UX but personally I find it pretty good, plus the hardware is a damn site more reliable than Suns sorry offerings.

        Does this refer to the Ultra-SPARC II cache problems? That was quite a long time ago now. The only other problem I've run across personally was the GbE chipset bug in the v240 (maybe others). That was Broadcom's bug... oh yeah, and of course hard drives wear out practically every day. Anything more interesting?

        • No, it does refer to the hardware in general. I own several Suns, HPs and administered SGIs and Alphas.

          The HP 9000 series are built like tanks. Very heavy, CPUs bigger than your CD drive. Nothing (at least no conventional weapons) will destroy them.
          SGI and Alpha often come in surprisingly cheap cases, but their interior is more reliable than the more robust looking Suns (the RAM and the HDDs being their weak points).
          • I've never seen an HP9000, and of course there are lots of cheap and nasty Sun model like Ultra 5, 10, Blade 100.

            However, my Sun Blade 1000 meets your description of the HPs to a tee. Very nice build quality indeed. Tool-free case. SCA-II form-factor FCAL disks. Monster cpu modules which need a torque wrench for correct fitting. Almost cable-free inside (everything clipped and tidy). Large quiet fans. Load-controlled cpu cooling. Takes a serious workload indefinitely without sweat. Lashings of expansion sp

      • Yes and no. I agree that Compaq really had no idea what to make of Tru64, but I've still yet to see another Unix that natively has the capabilities of Tru64. The single system image takes some getting used to, but it's amazing that every member can effectively access anything that any one member can see, i.e., if member1 has it mounted, member0 can read/write to/from it. I've also not seen a native filesystem with the robustness of AdvFS. I've personally done a test where I keyed off a running Alpha and
      • I'm involved in porting Tru64 code to HPUX. I can't exactly agree with your conclusions.

      • What rubbish. I've used both, and H-POX is about 3 years behind Tru64 in development terms. Not to mention very proprietary in its feel. Some simple examples:

        -- you can't get a process listing from ps(1) that shows you the run state ( ps -ef doesn't support that) cos it doesn't understand any BSD flags. Tru64 has supported both bsd and sysv flags from inception.

        -- Every Unix I've ever come across supports "ifconfig -a" to list all available network devices. Even OSX supports it. But H-POX has to be
      • People knock HP-UX but personally I find it pretty good, plus the hardware is a damn site more reliable than Suns sorry offerings.

        You mean their hardware used to be reliable, back in the days of the K series servers. And I'd also say they had the most advanced Unix back in those days, too.

        But that was then, this is now. I've had nothing but problems with their rp series. And don't even talk to me about their disk arrays, I have 2 Sure-Sores issuing I/O errors for the last 8 months, even after HP has repl
    • by theguywhosaid ( 751709 ) on Monday December 06, 2004 @10:12AM (#11007417) Homepage
      HP-SUX.

      I mean it in a nice way though.

      They are letting Alpha CPUs die, even though they rock, because they sank so much money into Itanium.

      They are dropping a Unix better than their own, because they can't suck it up and admit Tru64 is better. (I am taking your word for it #6336)

      HP-SUX
      • by runderwo ( 609077 ) * <runderwo.mail@win@org> on Monday December 06, 2004 @10:28AM (#11007524)
        Actually, it seems like they are trying to kill off two CPU architectures (PA-RISC and Alpha) as well as two Unixes (HP-UX and Tru64), all so that they are less distracted from betting the farm on Itanium and Linux/Windows. It's rather a shame that the years of effort and innovation that went into those architectures and systems are due to be wasted in such a tepid manner.
        • Which if funny since Microsoft announced they are dropping support for Itanium... so thats an expensive propietary Linux server.

          Yeah..that will sell to about the 3 people in the world stupid enough to run Linux on something non-x86.
          • Yeah..that will sell to about the 3 people in the world stupid enough to run Linux on something non-x86.

            How is this stupid, exactly? There is even commercial support available for non-x86 linux.
        • errrm, why do you think they are killing off HP-UX??
          I have just been to a seminar on the self same OS and their roadmap goes out to 2012 for just 11i V1, and that is not even taking into account V2 and the planned V3!!
        • all so that they are less distracted from betting the farm on Itanium and Linux/Windows.

          You're certainly wrong there... HP isn't investing in Linux on the server side very much. AFAIK, they don't support Windows on high-end servers either...

          It really looked like they were going to maintain Tru64 for a little while longer, and then drop it in favor of HP-UX-only (on Itanium no less). Meanwhile, OpenVMS won't ever die, even with the complete stupidity and mismanagement of Compaq, and now HP.

        • Give me the lowest integral x such that $1.0*10^x will suffice to buy the Alpha, the PA-RISC, HP-UX, and Tru64 from HP. When then next bubble expands with me in the center, I would buy these four technologies from HP, Open Source the two operating systems, and give everyone the rights to implement the two architectures for free. That would be my act of kindness.

          Seriously, I am very curious as to how much these four techonologies are worth to HP. I truely hope someone with the resources would buy back the A

        • you mean three arhitectures They sell the itanic team to intella http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=20024/ [theinquirer.net] Schwartz continues, in his now-familiar, combative blog-style: "This abandonment is indisputable evidence that HP-UX is on its way to Hewlett Packard's industry leading collection of dead architectures. We've all watched the demise of Alpha, Tru64, PA-RISC, Itanium, storage - it's now irrefutable that HP-UX is on its way to that same, very crowded boneyard. Along with the systems devoted to runn
        • I was wondering... There's this rumor NSA have their own Alpha fab. If thats true, wouldn't they have to pay quite a lot for the IP and wouldn't it be in their advantage when the Alpha is futher not used anymore? HP still would earn from the IP while doing nothing for it. Futhermore, if NSA supports in-house with e.g. SELinux then why would they care for Tru64 or OpenVMS? OTOH, if they licensed Tru64 or OpenVMS perhaps they're allowed to keep their source for their own while HP reaps the benefit from it via
      • by DAldredge ( 2353 ) <SlashdotEmail@GMail.Com> on Monday December 06, 2004 @10:32AM (#11007558) Journal
        That is what happens when you make a History major who only cares about her personal income the CEO of your company.

        They question people should be asking is why the board hasn't fired her yet.
        • That is what happens when you make a History major who only cares about her personal income the CEO of your company.

          You conveniently left out the two more important parts of her education from her biography [hp.com]:

          Fiorina holds a master's degree in business administration from the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland at College Park, Md., and a master of science degree from MIT's Sloan School.
    • by flaming-opus ( 8186 ) on Monday December 06, 2004 @11:49AM (#11008274)
      Tru64 definately is a better Unix. However, it has never been very successful in the commercial marketplace. Switching over to a Tru64 system would completely alienate the hp-ux customers, and there are MORE hp-ux customers.

      HP-UX is an old relic, (seriously. working in the HP kernel is like looking at ATT unix from the mid 80's), but it works. It has the virtualization features one might expect from a high-end unix, and a lot of software support. It doesn't preform particularly quickly, and it's kinda obscure and clunky. What it really lacks is a mature 3rd generation filesystem, which is why it comes bundled with Vxfs.

      Dec's AdvFS is not really any better than Veritas, except that it's so nicely integrated with Truclusters. I don't know how well Veritas' clustered filesystem works, but it runs on solaris and linux. Thus you can run both linux and hp-ux on vpars within the same hp server, and share data. Though I really liked trucluster/cfs, it would only be really helpful if they ported to both linux and hp-ux.

      Appart from making the Tru64 -> HP-UX transition harder, I don't see that they lose any features by picking veritas over CFS. It just seems like hiring a few more engineers would have been cheaper than playing this back-and-forth game with marketing.
      • This may be HP's biggest mistake so far. When they merged, they said they'll keep the best from both companies. Apperently, that means they'll keep all the HP stuff and none of the good Compaq stuff(enterprise support, excellent OS,...).
        I've worked with both AdvFS and Vxfs. Personally, I prefer advfs. The administration is so much easier. If you need more space..addvol . If you need to take the disk back and re-assign it some where else, rmvol .
        With vxfs, adding space is easy. You add a disk to the volume
      • ``...it's kinda obscure and clunky...''

        Heh, heh. Anyone ever tell you that you have a gift for understatement?

        ``Dec's AdvFS is not really any better than Veritas, except that it's so nicely integrated with Truclusters. I don't know how well Veritas' clustered filesystem works, but it runs on solaris and linux. Thus you can run both linux and hp-ux on vpars within the same hp server, and share data. Though I really liked trucluster/cfs, it would only be really helpful if they ported to both linux and

  • by ScriptMonkey ( 660975 ) on Monday December 06, 2004 @09:50AM (#11007290)
    Trying to port the Tru64 clustering features into HP/UX was a bit like trying to fit a jet engine into a Yugo.
    • aside from their choice of using .sl instead of .so (for that matter, Apple's use of dylib bugs me, too), HP-UX really isn't that bad. From a compatibility and performance standpoint, I've always liked it better than AIX, though I'd still pick Solaris if forced to pick a commercial UNIX.

      I'm getting new AIX hardware soon (at work), so I'll have to see if they boosted performance in the past 2 years, but I think the OS sucks so bad I doubt it'll matter.

      I don't miss Tru64 - too many portibility problems. I
      • AIX is still the top of my list. They are the only ones who got the patching concept down right. Solaris patching system is the worst, they are so 90s. AIX can download maintainance level by number to number. You download 1. The next one is 1-to-2. If you skip, it's 1-to-3 or whatever. Hpux and AIX I am hoping will be the last commercial unix. With linux being the free alternative.

      • I'm getting new AIX hardware soon (at work), so I'll have to see if they boosted performance in the past 2 years, but I think the OS sucks so bad I doubt it'll matter.

        Have you seen Power5 benches lately?

        They kick the crap out of almost everything else out there.

        I remember when POWER chips were crap price/performance (when I worked for Big Blue and built my RS/6ks out of leftover junker parts) but those days are over...

        Also, I would hope stuff like the ODM has improved since 3.2.5, and as much as people
        • AIX isn't so bad once you get used to it. I've always had good luck with JFS and the multi-cpu performance.

          Probably the biggest weirdness is the memory management system and threading. AIX has a very fine grain MM system and it's easy to blow something up when memory is getting low. ALWAYS have extra ram with AIX.

          My other biggest problem was the standard unix tools which came with AIX.. were SO OLD. This has mostly been rectified with the GNU toolset, and the 4.0 AIX series. The C compiler was very g
      • > From a compatibility and performance standpoint, I've always liked it better than AIX, though I'd still pick Solaris if forced to pick a commercial UNIX.

        To quote an HP Support Engineer: The HP-RISC servers would be the best if they had Solaris as the O/S.
  • If HP Unix is dominant in your business model, why not open source the other, more advanced offerings so that others not constrained by your business model can make it work?

    • Well, there's SCO et al (all sorts of third-party copyrights and patents probably apply to Tru64), and there's the fact that if Tru64 were out there open-source nobody would want HP-UX anyway.
      • Jeffy, Jeffy, Jeffy:

        Tru64 is a *clean* reimplementation of Unix. No AT&T code at all. So, tell me about SCO again?
        • The US has software patents. So, tell me about various rights holders (possibly, but not necessarily, including and not limited to SCO) again?
          • Jeff:

            There is only one patent on Bell Labs (AT&T) Unix. 4,135,240 descibing the set-uid bit. Anything else in a basic implementation would be covered by prior art from the AT&T implementation (note that in the 70s, software was not considered patentable -- so the set-uid patent is for a circuit implementing that method).

            Unless its an "Advanced" feature, done independently. Those patents must be much more recent, and OSF/1 itself may provide prior art to demolish those claims. SCO doesn't have any
    • Presumably it was not an HP person that would moderate a reasonable request to be a flaimbait. There are lots of them and their customers, I am sure, who still know how great it is. Digital stuff was great stuff, and they had many technologies before the market curve, some that have never appeared outside. How about their spiralog filesystem. I'd love to be able to try to make those concepts work with Linux.
  • by shoppa ( 464619 ) on Monday December 06, 2004 @10:00AM (#11007347)
    Both Tru64 (or whatever it's called this month, I've been using it for over a decade now, so I still tend to call it OSF/1, and occasionally slip into Digital Unix) and HP-UX have a lot of layers added on over their core of "standard" Unix. (Others will go into great detail about how these are neither "standard" Unix cores but some variant of some variant of some variant of some microkernel but nobody cares anymore, that is really so early 90's.) They both have extensive system management GUI's, of course not compatible with each other, as well as fundamentally different "clustering" support. (Note my quotes, whenever you talk about any other product's clustering you always denigrate it by quoting that word.) To mix the two together is a holy living nightmare.

    Most sites that are migrating are going away from both as fast as they can. There are a small fraction that truly depend on clustering or other proprietary feature, unfortunately everybody is holding on tenaciously to said features despite the fact that they really do 99% of the applications no good. And most commercial applications have been somehow hoodwinked into the proprietary hooks.

    • To my mind of the attractions of F/OSS is that support for older products does not go away in the same way as it does for commercial products. If you download FreeBSD (for example) and install it you have no support and that's not going away. Sure, you have to be able support it yourself but hopefully you're not going away either!

      If you have the source and some programmers then you're self supporting and can control your own destiny.
    • Others will go into great detail about how these are neither "standard" Unix cores but some variant of some variant of some variant of some microkernel but nobody cares anymore, that is really so early 90's

      Tru64 is every bit as much a Microkernel OS as GNU/Hurd or OS X, they all use Mach. Hope pointing that out isn't too "early 90s". :)

      And most commercial applications have been somehow hoodwinked into the proprietary hooks.

      Why do you say "somehow"? How many alternatives would the early adopters of Tru64

  • It's strange they'd suddenly cut their losses like this, but with the pressure from Linux and the Open Source world on the unix market, one would expect HP and others to abandon projects like this in favor of projects where the competition isn't literally giving it away.

    Ultimately, manufacturers like HP and Sun are increasingly pushed into niche and legacy markets as PCs get faster and Linux and BSD become more capable. I would expect more withdrawals like this in the future rather than less.

    More than t

  • by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 06, 2004 @10:10AM (#11007407)
    Some of the TruCluster stuff is REALLY COOL!

    For those not familiar, picture a filesystem that can be mounted on 2 or more hosts at once instead of mounted from one then NFS-exported (or Samba, either way) from one host to all the others.

    TruCluster was way ahead of its' time, the Digital guys were WAY ahead of their time.

    This just really ticks me off because the Veritas version is NOT AS GOOD and has FAR MORE BUGS.

    Aaargh!

    Some days, I hate HP.
  • Customers (Score:3, Insightful)

    by b0lt ( 729408 ) on Monday December 06, 2004 @10:15AM (#11007436)
    What happens when their customers already committed to Tru64? Are they left out to dry? (My work was going to go to Tru64)
  • by Nom du Keyboard ( 633989 ) on Monday December 06, 2004 @10:33AM (#11007567)
    Saw this in letters to The Register. Rather sums it up well.

    "It's a good thing that HP never acquired the rights to penicillin. If they had, mankind would have perished from widespread disease while HP tried to figure out how integrate it with anthrax."

  • by CharAznable ( 702598 ) on Monday December 06, 2004 @10:49AM (#11007689)
    Sad to see how superior technology gets caught up in corporate mergers and gets killed. First, the DEC faithful had to swallow up the indignity of seeing DEC swallowed up by a Compaq, and then this...
    I spent many a nights hacking Fortran on DEC boxes running everything from Ultrix to Digital Unix 4.. those were the good times..

  • by yorkpaddy ( 830859 ) on Monday December 06, 2004 @10:51AM (#11007709)
    I understand why they bought Compaq, but why not spin off Digital. I wish Compaq had never bought Digital. Digital did a lot of cool things, Compaq was able to help them some, but HP has no idea what to do with their stuff.
    • As an ex-CPQ guy, I wish Compaq had never bought Digital, either. To a large degree, Compaq had little respect for Tru-64 -- and that didn't do them any favors. More importantly, the absorption of DEC management philosophy and corporate attitude dramatically and fatefully changed the internals of the company. It was the Greeks assimilating the Romans all over again, and eventually Compaq paid the price.
    • Sure sure, DEC was great, Compaq/HP are evil.

      Get your head out of your VMS manual for a second, and see that the world has changed. I used to work at the R&D-shop of a telco. A lot of cool stuff was going on there. They cooked up new mobile networks, they experimented with building a PBX out of a PC, etc. I had a great time there.

      By the time I left however, they had been ordered to ready themselves for the 'real world'. After a few major reorganisations, everything that went on there must be able to b
  • by haggar ( 72771 ) on Monday December 06, 2004 @11:23AM (#11007986) Homepage Journal
    My boss and I have been just talking about this. HP is junking all of their best technologies. Ttu64 had a best of breed clustering. So, what does HP do? Junk it and buy the technology from Veritas.

    No surprise they junked the Alpha. No surprise they even junked the PA-RISC. No wonder they are becoming another Dell. Yep, HP used to mean quality at a higher cost - but people were willing to put up with that because HP anything was going to work with precision, reliably for the next century. Now, the HP servers and spares we are getting are less and less reliable.
    • by Anonymous Coward
      During my stint at HP, I saw:

      1) HP buy Verifone for the payment gateway and POS card terminal business, then basically junk the card reader business through sheer atrophy AND eventually the same thing with the software line. Really ticked off the Royal Bank of Canada who was a key customer for the Internet payment gateway. That cost around a $1.0B if I recall.

      2) Invest $200 odd million on an agreement with BEA to co-market their application server solutions;

      3) Buy Bluestone and drop the BEA agreement.
  • artcles (Score:3, Informative)

    by plopez ( 54068 ) on Monday December 06, 2004 @11:52AM (#11008298) Journal
    both the reg and the inqwell have more information. Somewhere buried in the stories of the past few weeks is the strange fact that Compaq/DEC had a license for Veritas storage technology file system which they folded into Tru64 and now HP is going to pay for the licence a second time for HP-UX. Truly a sign of a management team that does not know what it has.

    THe letters from customers are interesting as well.

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/12/03/hp_tru64 _l etters/
    http://www.chipzilla.com/?article=20021
    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/12/02/hp_ends_tr u64/
  • Tru64 / OpenVMS (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Exter-C ( 310390 ) on Monday December 06, 2004 @12:40PM (#11008728) Homepage
    Its a shame that DEC / Compaq and now HP have not really supported one of the most advanced and stable operating systems the world has ever seen. Having been a long term alpha processor / server user with both OpenVMS and Tru64 it was such a shame what happened to DEC, Alpha, OpenVMS, Tru64. It just goes to show that at the end of the day the best products may not survive.

    • I have to agree with what you say. The entire situation saddens me. With no real alternative to the product line up its very difficult to say.. oh we need to completely rewrite our application to support xyz arch. Tru64 + Alpha = Awesome
  • by multiplexo ( 27356 ) on Monday December 06, 2004 @01:51PM (#11009347) Journal
    I worked at Amazon.com when we had major, major problems with AdvFS filesystems shitting all over themselves in Digital Unix 4.0E and 4.0F in late 1999 and early 2000. Compaq's advice was to take the affected filesystems offline once a month and run AdvFS verify on them, which, since it took six to eight hours to run on a filesystem of any size, kind of fucked up our goal of hitting 5 nines uptime. Dealing with Compaq's technical support at the time was similarly painful. I recall calling them late one night in November of 1999 when a filesystem went bad and spending almost 2 hours in a phone tree from Hell before I finally got an engineer on the line who even knew what an AdvFS filesystem was. This was with a Compaq gold support contract.

    When Amazon switched over to HP servers running HP/UX 11 in 2000 there were a lot of annoying things about the change in operating systems but as far as the filesystems went I thought that I had died and gone to heaven. LVM on HP was rock stable and simple compared to the insanely complex LSM on Digital Unix, and the HP's filesystem didn't shit itself the way that AdvFS, which we referred to as the "Adventure FileSystem" because using it was a real adventure in finding out whether or not your files would be available in a day's time, did. I for one won't miss AdvFS.

    • Interesting. In mid 2000 I started working with Tru64 and never had any issues whatsoever with AdvFS. I've had everything from a single internal disk in an old 500MHz Alpha (I forget the model) running 4.0F to 23+TB of storage attached to a two-node GS320 cluster running 5.1 (the filesystems were ~1.2TB each). I've had two high-availability GS140 clusters (one with 4.0F and one with 5.1A) running 4 nines uptime (2.4TB of storage on each cluster, mirrored between cabinets to five 1.2TB of protected storag
    • I don't have that much problems with AdvFS (1 real disaster and 1 smaller problem while running 20-25 alphaservers in the last 7 years, though that's still 2 more than on our rather smaller number of HP-UX servers, true). Tru64 5.x AdvFS is OK with me, and rather easy to use.

      I certainly won't miss LSM at all though, but then I wouldn't miss LVM either, they're both too convoluted to me. I rather like the simplicity of Solaris in that respect.

      I will miss never having had the chance to run a Tru64 5 clu

    • Hmmm glad its not just me. I had an old AdvFs file system eat itself for lunch not more than a couple of months ago...

    • Yes AdvFS was a bit buggy at V4. It was also funneled and tied to running on the base CPU, which created a real bottle neck.

      But it was completely re-written for V5 to be fully multi threaded and could run on any CPU. This was a real turning point for AdvFS, it was incredibly stable a very fast after that.

      I've been building TruCluster since the beginning, hundreds of them; and since V5 I've never had a cluster go belly up to the point of being unrecoverable. AdvFS is rock solid now.

      In fact, I'm the onl

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