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From: eckert@immd4.informatik.uni-erlangen.de (Toerless Eckert)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sequent
Subject: Re: obsolete Sequent software
Message-ID: <1991Feb26.173944.3570@informatik.uni-erlangen.de>
Date: 26 Feb 91 17:39:44 GMT
References: <124108@uunet.UU.NET>
Organization: CSD., University of Erlangen, Germany
Lines: 60

From article <124108@uunet.UU.NET>, by rick@uunet.uu.net (Rick Adams):
> Given the complete system hangs (as in push the "reset button to
> "continue" running) we've been experiencing several times per week,
> "rock solid" would indeed describe the system performance. But then you
> really can't do much computing with a solid rock, can you?

Except for a few nfs daemons that refused ("D") to continue working,
we don't have stability problems, and our suns are booted and
crashing much more often then the sequent. I think it only depends on
how much you exploit the problems of a given system, and you may much
more exploit the sequent system problems than you're sun systems
problems - If you want to exploit the suns problems read the
buglist and patchlist from you're friendly sun support, every bug listed
therein will work. Of course the "real adventure of sun" (TM)
only starts after you've fiddled along with the known bugs
and depart into the land of unknown bugs. Often you will meet again
old old bugs from the good old days of SunOS 3 appearing again
on the surface of "high performance SunOS 4.1.1" (TM).

> If we were to measure the downtime of our 1 Sequent against the
> downtime of our dozen Suns conbined,  the Sequent downtime would be an
> order of magnitude higher. I long for the ability of running "unstable"
> Sun software. Question: Which is better? 1) "buggy" Sun lock managers
> for NFS that don't work 1% of the time or 2) "non-existant" but 
> rock solid Sequent lock managers?

Every os is missing someting and dynix may be missing something more
some more than SunOS, but it's quite a philosophy at which step
of development you put some kind of software out to the customer.
Sun is very adventerous in this respect
(remember the "NFS Jumbo Patch Revision 3" tape, this time
for 4.1.1, now tmp and tfs filesystems start to work).

If you have a favour for "untested creeping bugs" (TM), go for Sun.
If you want "good old 4.2bsd software", go for dynix.
If you want "The real thing" (TM) go for clean bsd, and port it to the
machine of you're choice. At least you can easily get sources and
fix it youreself.
I though admit that the development of ptx seems to have taken the
drive out of dynix development. Maybe this will change now.

> (Ever notice that the Dynix release schedule takes longer and slips
> more times than the BSD release schedule? I suppose its another attempt
> at Berkeley compatibility even if the customers dont want that level of
> compatibility...)

What, 3.1 dynix is already there, but 4.4 bsd is still under development,
so what ?

As for sun: A company that get's out the patch tapes
for their SunOS earlyer than they start shipping the CD-roms for
that same SunOS is really a joke.


Disclaimer: This are my personnel opinions, and nothing else.
---

             Toerless.Eckert@informatik.uni-erlangen.de
    /C=de/A=dbp/P=uni-erlangen/OU=informatik/S=Eckert/G=Toerless
;-) No signature due to pending copyright lawsuit over last signature ;-)


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