While the DS6800 has been withdrawn from marketing, it has not reached end of support. Consequently, I am pretty confident IBM will continue to respond to support issues for the entire system, including the SMC, as long as it is their installation. If you install a non-IBM disk drive, I don't expect them to do much. The same if you install the SMC software on a non-IBM platform.
Since the principal function of the SMC software is to configure the virtual 3390 drives, once your system is up and running you hardly ever need to use it. I wonder how many sites still have the logon password available. If the CE needs to use the SMC and it doesn't work correctly, the site shouldn't care if the cause is IBM's software or the operating system or the SMC hardware. Even if the operating system was still supported, the probability that the OS company (be it Microsoft for Windows, IBM for OS/2, whoever for Linux, etc) will produce a fix in time to solve the site's original problem is indistinguishable from zero. So it falls to the CE and IBM to come up with an alternate tool for the CE to do his job. Since both the SMC software and the OS have been working successfully for some years and they are not subject to wear and tear, concerns about the supportability of the OS seem to be so much FUD. Since the major portion of XP updates in the past few years have been for security issues, any site that has the SMC connected to an external network might want to reevaluate that. How often, and why, does someone connect to the SMC remotely? What is the cost if that is no longer possible? Why is the security exposure that was fixed on the last update (and therefore in existence for over ten years) suddenly less of an issue than the next exposure that won't be fixed? Has anyone installed malware protection on an SMC? If so, how do you keep it updated? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
