Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!pacbell!ames!killer!tness7!tness1!sugar!karl
From: karl@sugar.uu.net (Karl Lehenbauer)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.microport
Subject: Re: uport Support
Summary: Details of a recent good experience; the reported fix that wasn't;
	 It wasn't always their fault
Message-ID: <2319@sugar.uu.net>
Date: 22 Jul 88 01:18:44 GMT
References: <17124@sgi.SGI.COM> <351@bdt.UUCP> <369@uport.UUCP>
Organization: Sugar Land Unix - Houston, TX
Lines: 30

My use of Microport System V/AT (286) is on the decline, as we're moving to
a 386 and, to say the least, it has been a frustrating experience running
it these last two years.

While I haven't always found Microport's tech support to be that great, they
recently saved my butt when I trashed my hard drive's partition end record
(by entering bad CMOS-RAM drive types - can you believe it?) and had 
only a month-old backup.  They were very helpful and provided technical 
information that was essential to restore it.  Half the problem of restoring 
the partitions, though, was that the divvy released with 2.3 was compiled 
with the wrong include file, causing me to be unable to get to two of the 
three partitions on the second drive.  Nonetheless, I couldn't have done 
it without them, and is was a favorable experience.

The thing that I think most infuriated me during the two-year experience
was the claim in the 2.3 release notes that filesystem size problems 
had been fixed and filesystems could be safely built up to around 131071 
blocks.  Unfortunately, fsck had bugs that trashed filesystems bigger 
than (as far as I can tell) 65535 blocks, even when the filesystems were OK.
I lost my filesystems because of this.

Now that I'm running a competitor's 386 Unix, I am beginning to see that
Microport inherited a lot of bugs from AT&T.  For example, uucico with 
-x4 causes uucico to dump core on the 286 and hang, weird out or 
dump core on the 386...doubtful that uPort caused it.  Also, the 286 is
brain-damaged, tho' I've heard that SCO Xenix has far fewer problems (too
expensive for me, I'm afraid.)
-- 
-- backups:  always in season; never out of style.
-- karl@sugar.uu.net aka uunet!sugar!karl