I have just written a service machine to query our three VM ADSM servers
once an hour, massage the responses, and write them to a disk that is
shared among the folks who do field support for ADSM.

This works beautifully when its virtual machine has a console connected,
but DSMADMC fails to produce output when the virtual machine is
running disconnected.  As my application stacks console input for the
client and captures the "console" output in a pipeline, one would expect
it to run correctly without having a physical console.

As far as I can tell, the ADSM CMS client will not read console input
from the stack when the virtual machine is running disconnected, but
happily does so when there is a physical console.  The symptom I'm seeing
is "ANS5521E I/O Error reading command input."  It's hard to believe that
such a restriction could have been built into the client on purpose (and
not easy to see how it could have been done inadvertently).

I'm hoping I'm just doing something wrong, because I'd hate to think
that a product that had its origins on VM could be that stupid about CMS
interfaces, but I'm beginning to believe that DSMADMC really is deciding
not to read from the stack if the console is disconnected.

Has anybody succeeded in using the CMS client in this way?  Suggestions
about what I might do to make it work?  The latest DSMADMC MODULE I have
is dated 7/25/95; is there a later one?

Melinda Varian,
Princeton University