Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!hsi!stpstn!aad
From: aad@stpstn.UUCP (Anthony A. Datri)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.rt
Subject: Re: Why is AIX not "useful"? (was "Re: BSD Unix on 6150-135?")
Message-ID: <2854@stpstn.UUCP>
Date: 27 Feb 89 23:28:16 GMT
References: <2650@spdcc.SPDCC.COM> <583@jc3b21.UUCP>
Reply-To: aad@stepstone.com
Organization: The Stepstone Corporation, Sandy Hook, CT
Lines: 32

>Question:  why is AIX not "useful"?  I have found it to be very robust
>(to the point of requiring 30MB to install 2.1.2 with DS!) and I am
>quite pleased with the way that *most* BSD code compiles and runs with
>little or no problems (read that as 90-95% of BSD code).

I've found that our AIX machines have the annoying tendency to get
corrupted, giving an "error reading iodn 16384" (or some number close to
that) when trying to boot, and nothing short of re-installing seems to
solve it.  AIX also has really poor default partitioning.  Doing a
default install on an RT with 3 114 meg drives results in a total of
about 70 or 80 meg used, across the drives.  A default of 16 maximum
ptys is also bad, as is having to create them one at a time.  I find it
amazing that online manual pages are a seperate product, and the
elements from IBM's mainframe os's like "minidisks" instead of partitions
and ocurrences of "IPL" are kind of odd.

>Having seen AIX go from 2.1 to 2.2.1 I have experienced the "painless"
>upgrades (compared to what I've heard about some BSD boxes :-) except
>that installing from floppy is ridiculous.

IBM installed 2.1.2 on our RT's, with default partitioning.  We thought
we just had one 70 meg drive in there until I opened the suckers up and
found 3 114's.  I just installed 2.2 from scratch, and it went fairly well
after I figured out which of the subsets I needed.  I haven't tried an
actual incremental upgrade, but many, many vendors do a less than admirable
job at them.  I was once told that 2.2.1 would do NFS -- is true?  Is it
a seperate product?
-- 
@disclaimer(Any concepts or opinions above are entirely mine, not those of my
	    employer, my GIGI, my VT05, or my 11/34)
beak is@>beak is not
Anthony A. Datri @SysAdmin(Stepstone Corporation) aad@stepstone.com stpstn!aad