Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!hc!pprg.unm.edu!unmvax!nmtsun!peter@hydrovax.nmt.edu
From: peter@hydrovax.nmt.edu
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.rt
Subject: Why I feel AIX is not usefull (Does this belong here?)
Message-ID: <2036@nmtsun.nmt.edu>
Date: 27 Feb 89 18:00:07 GMT
Sender: news@nmtsun.nmt.edu
Organization: New Mexico Tech Hydrology Program
Lines: 96

Hi again,

Unfortunately I can not provide examples of the many problems we are
having with AIX because I am at school 80 miles from our site. I have
installed and administered the system since its installation though.

Someone mentioned a painless upgrade to 2.2.1

Our upgrade to 2.2.1 failed miserably due to several bad disks. It was
nice of IBM to come out and rectify the situation, but we still had 
down time due to it. The version that they DID install would not execute
shell scripts or binaries properly because for some reason it sets the
current working directory to '/' (yes root). Make fails because my files
are not in '/'.  I have very recently installed a new version (more disks 
borrowed from IBM). It seems to be ok now. When Make *could* find the files
that I was compiling, it didn't work on any imbedded commands. It would
either fail without explanation or give an error number that wasn't in the 
manual. 

The asynch driver is still broken. Terminals have to be run at 19200 or
AIX throws away output characters. I have tried numerous flow control
and bit/parity combinations, to no avail. I would really like to hang
a 2400 baud modem on the system so I can call in from school, but the
system (getty) won't send nl at 2400. It also locks up after I reply to the
login prompt. IBM sent out a tech. He couldn't figure it out either,
but verified that the systems at IBM (Albuquerque) have the same problem.
Of course this may be a hardware bug and BSD might behave the same.

The system doesn't provide job control or sockets, which is more a drawback
of sysV than AIX specifically. The console mimics job control using the
utilities found in the Useability Services, but it is a poor substitute
and only good for the person using console. 

Curses is broken under AIX. I will try and bring an example to post when
I return from work this weekend.

VS/FORTRAN has bugs. Again I do not want to cite an example until I can
bring verified source code to post. I haven't looked under 2.2.1, but the 
fortran compiler has a poorly written shell script for a front end. It's the 
three pass variety and ALWAYS linked (even if there were warnings and/or 
errors) when it was finished. We re-wrote it, but it is a pain none the less. 
Our earlier version of the OS came with F77. This one doesn't. IBM says
we have to purchase it now.  The VS/FORTRAN does have its saving graces. 
VAX mode (although buggy) has drastically reduced the time it took to port 
some applications from the VAX.

The archive/library program is buggy and won't behave the same way two times
in a row. This is a particularly nasty problem because Make can't handle
an excessive (again I'm not prepared to cite numbers) number of file names
to link. It just crashes.

There are no man pages, and I have yet to get the 'help' command to yeild
anything resembleing an informative answer. Mostly all I get is a '... not
found' message. 

UUCP is broken. Anything I try to run says that it wants some earlier 
version of the VRM. A lot of files referenced in the manual aren't even
there. I *know* it's installed properly because I went back and did it again.

Nroff flags that are in the manual do nothing. (Again I'll bring examples
next week). 

DUMP is described wrong in the manual. We had to use some unusual magic
cookies on the command line to restore our file systems after 2.2.1 
scrambled it. We now avoid the problem by giving dump different flags. I
think part of our problem may have been our ignorance.

There are several functions in the BSD compatability libraries that do 
not perform in the manner described in the manual pages. There are other
routines that I suspect are just stubs.

In the same room with the RT is a VAX 11/730 running MORE/BSD 4.3. The RT
runs circles (many many circles) around that machine speed wise, but our
programmers claim they get better productivity from the 730 even though it's 
slow. BSD came with C, PASCAL, Fortran, Ingres, and a host of tools that make 
life easy. AIX requires that we purchase each of these, yet is more expensive
for the basic system than my entire BSD distibution. The BSD versions of
the compilers all work and work well. The IBM compilers are buggy and hard
to use.

I say that the AIX system is unproductive because there is a learning curve,
even for people who know sysV. We have two other sysV machines that we
do administrative/development work on. We should have been able to come
up to speed much quicker than we were able to. I don't beleive that people
should have to program/work around pitfalls in a machines architecture and 
operating system. Especially since it costs money every time we make a 
port to a new platform. 

There is a list of problems sitting on my desk. I will document them better
and email them to anyone who's interested.

Bye,

Peter Blemel

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