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From: folta@tove.cs.umd.edu (Wayne Folta)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.misc
Subject: Re: Not another NeXT defector???!!!
Summary: Is it that easy to bring a NeXT back from a crash?
Message-ID: <27576@mimsy.umd.edu>
Date: 10 Nov 90 02:42:12 GMT
References: <1990Nov7.230807.17914@agate.berkeley.edu> <911@casbah.acns.nwu.edu> <2924@bridge2.ESD.3Com.COM> <1990Nov9.230811.20858@agate.berkeley.edu> <2927@bridge2.ESD.3Com.COM>
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Reply-To: folta@tove.cs.umd.edu (Wayne Folta)
Organization: U of Maryland, Dept. of Computer Science, Coll. Pk., MD 20742
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I have seen a lot of messages in this thread that state that the NeXT hides
UNIX so well that users will never see it. As a (Sun) UNIX user, I find this
very hard to believe.

For example, I spent _hours_ bringing a friend's Sun back from a crash the
other day (night, actually). Something weird happened, and when the machine
came back up and fsck'd, it trashed some files in /etc. Then it started
acting _really_ flakey, of course. So... we had to dig into the manuals,
pull out the tape sets (SunOS 4.0, then the 4.0.3 update tapes--two sets
of tapes) and have at it. I managed to get to the point (maybe in single-user
mode, maybe under the miniroot) that I could tar things off, then we spent
a half hour, or so loading the OS from the tapes. Unfortunately, we had
misread, and loaded the _update_ tapes, not the base installation tapes. After
flailing around for a while, we finally got the OS 4.0 loaded, then updated
to 4.0.3.

I'm no UNIX novice, either, having used UNIX for 10 years now, and having
been system administrator for a bunch of Suns at work. Imagine what a novice
would have gone through!

I assume that the NeXT is _much_ easier to use than a Sun, but still, I cannot
imagine it being as easy as a Mac. On the Mac, the entire OS fits on four
diskettes. If you have a problem, you can boot off of a single diskette and
run various programs to try to fix your HD. If that is unsuccessful, you
run through four diskettes and about 15 minutes to reinstall things (longer
if you format the HD).

I cannot believe that the NeXT has UNIX on a single diskette, or even 4
diskettes, so there is an obvious problem with systems that only have
diskettes (and the new ones will have the optical disk as an option, so
many people will have only diskettes).

So could a NeXT be as easy to resurrect as that? Actually, if a system file
gets munged on the Mac, you probably only have to copy the System and Finder
onto it to get yourself back up. But a UNIX system needs files in /etc, in
/lib, in /, ... not so easy.

This may also have nothing to do with the discussion, but my friend (or one
of the people working for him) managed to turn accounting on... That was
a time-bomb ticking away, eating up disk space until he finally crashed. If
I hadn't helped him, he would have never figured out what was hogging his
disk space. There are a lot of things in UNIX that can get "turned on" like
this, whose side-effects are unfathomable to novices. Of course, these things
don't get turned on by themselves, but still...
--


Wayne Folta          (folta@cs.umd.edu  128.8.128.8)