Undoubtedly life got interesting during the past six to eight months. Long before anyone declared that we were in a recession, we found it was getting harder and harder to generate work. As a result, I had less time to devote to FisherFindings and FisherNotebook.

Unfortunately, on a personal note, this increased stress only amplified health issues for me. My blood pressure went through the roof and my blood sugar suffered. Though I now appear to have those under control, it certainly made me decide to take time to restart this website.

As you can see, I spent the past week revamping FisherFindings. The old WordPress theme tended to Hang. The author of that theme has no further updates. So, I decided to select a new theme and build a new structure for it. My compliments to Inanis at http://www.inanis.net/ . As you can see, he modeled this theme on a well known computer operating system interface. So, it should be fairly easy for you to use and enjoy.

Introducing the New Look

As you can see, you will be able to find the same articles (these posts). Additonally, specific topics will be separated out to new menu items.

best

Under this menu you will find the stubs for the Best Practice for OpenVMS documents I will help drive through the OpenVMS community. Initially that will include:

• Host Based Volume Shadowing
• OpenVMS File System
• EVA Storage Arrays
• XP Disk Arrays

I will probably open a Forum Discussion for each of those topic areas. I will also be certain to communicate in HP’s ITRC and the OpenVMS.org website. We should build these Best Practices as an entire community. I will also provide presentations, podcasts, video presentations, and even possibly course material to help present the topics.

more

You can learn more using the pages and resources under this menu item. These resources will include:

• Courses
• Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
• Forum
• Links
• Polls
• Referrences

Over time I will develop courses to help enhance the information presented on this website. It will allow you to learn some of the basics, learn where to look for more information and be certain you and others are up to date with you knowledge of OpenVMS storage.

Of course, I will not reinvent FAQs already in place. However, I will add to that knowledgebase already in place. And since it can often be difficult to track down all the locations where FAQs exist, I hope to provide a link to many other sites.

To help facilitate consensus building, we will use a Forum format to capture thoughts and dicussions about Best Practices for OpenVMS Storage.

Of course, another resource are all the links I’ve developed and maintain over the years. This set of pages will help provide you with pointers to other resources.

Polls can be a fun way to see what others think about topics that deal with OpenVMS storage. This page will allow you to see what others think.

Finally, as I build various presentations, courses and such, I create a gather of references. You might find those help you as you learn more about the subject area. This set of pages will provide pointers toward additional background material. Since I use automated tools to check for broken links, I will try to keep all those pointers updated.

news

Since the FisherFindings website also includes a newsletter service along with it, this set of pages provides an online version of that information. Think of this as one more method to dive into the wealth of information about OpenVMS storage.

site

Finally, under this menu item you will find site specific information. For example:

• about
• contact
• policies
• sitemap
• users

Since you probably want to know a little more about me, why I am passionate about OpenVMS storage (of all things!), I provide this brief information about me. You can also find information under my LinkedIn profile.

You will find that I welcome your input, so provide the contact page. Of course, due to spammers it is necessary to provide a “Are You Human?” challenge. As we all do, I wish that step was not necessary. Still, I try to respond as quickly as possible.

Since we live in a litigious society, I provide a set of policies which I use to help drive this website. Though I use a humorous tone in the policies, please understand that I am constrained by what I can and should provide as answers to you in this venue. So remember the maxim: ”You get what you pay for!”.

And of course, what growing site would be complete without a sitemap. This is an automated tool to help you locate information. Of course, since I can move things around on the website fairly easily, I suspect you won’t be the only one using this facility.

Finally, you might be interested in how many users access the website at one time. Unfortunately, a high percentage are due to spammers attempting to access this site and add junk. That takes me back to the policies. If you find junk (or worse) from spammers, just let me know. I will remove it.

Enjoy

So, here’s hoping you enjoy the results of this work. There is a lot of work (late nights) that I put into this. Your input is definitely welcome.

Regards,
=jbf=

John B. Fisher

Welcome to FisherFindings! As you can see, I redid this website to solve some problems with WordPresss and other plugin tools. Sorry for any inconvenience. Hopefully this will be ready to rock and roll. I have several posts that I will make this week. So, hopefully you will find it helpful.

So, what is this blog all about?

Mission Statement

The blog title says it all. This blog attempts to transfer my lessons learned about OpenVMS Storage issues to the rest of the OpenVMS community.

Read the rest of this entry »