The remaining interactive load (mainly mail & editing) will be absorbed by workgroup servers supporting the desktop. These will be based on the existing Novell based NICE environment for PC and Macs and a similar environment being develop for UNIX.
They are setting up a task force to faciltate the VM migration and 1 FTE from CN has been assigned to it. They are currently defining the areas in VM that have to be moved and are monitoring VM to understand the current use. Email is recognized as a major component to be moved. For UNIX they are looking at Z-mail. They will be moving the Oracle servers on VM to UNIX. There appear to be no plans to support FORTRAN 90 from Oracle. CERN makes little use of the ProREXX interface so there are no plans to port it to UNIX. On the other hand Pierantoio Marquesini of L3 did not feel it would be hard to port ProREXX to Regina (see section on L3 plans for VM) on UNIX.
L3's main concern is the many service machines and EXECs which control their production system and provide the master database system. They estimate they have over 100K lines of VM REXX code. The code is stable and often untouched for several years. A largely automated port would be preferable to a buggy re-write. They are actively investigating moving this code to UNIX by using the public domain Regina 0.5H (REXX implementation on UNIX). To facilitate this, they have: developed an RXSOCKET interface; implemented about 60% of the HEP REXX functions for Regina; and are developing automatic conversions for EXECIO and GLOBALV calls. They have found it easy to develop external functions for Regina. They are investigating how to adress IOS3270 (block mode full-screen 3270 interactive access), SPOOL, CMS PIPES, & XEDIT functions, possibly utilizing curses for the full screen emulation. They estimate that it will take item 2-3 man years to move, on top of the additional FTEs providing normal support and development in their Unix environment. They aim to accomplish the move by mid 1995.
They do not expect end users on UNIX to use REXX (Regina), rather they expect them move & move to use UNIX tools commonly used in the Unix community outside HEP (such as Perl).
There is a SENDFILE emulator out there that can simulate spool files from a Rick Trott. L3 uses CURSES to emulate XEDIT macro usage.