Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ames!mailrus!purdue!decwrl!labrea!Portia!forel!karish
From: karish@forel.stanford.edu (Chuck Karish)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.rt
Subject: Re: Why is AIX not "useful"? (was "Re: BSD Unix on 6150-135?")
Message-ID: <560@Portia.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 1 Mar 89 05:11:35 GMT
References: <2650@spdcc.SPDCC.COM> <583@jc3b21.UUCP> <2854@stpstn.UUCP>
Sender: news@Portia.Stanford.EDU
Reply-To: karish@forel.stanford.edu (Chuck Karish)
Organization: Stanford University School of Earth Sciences
Lines: 52

In article <2854@stpstn.UUCP> aad@stepstone.com wrote:
>AIX also has really poor default partitioning.

The installation menu gives you the chance to change the partitioning
pretty painlessly.

>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.

I'm just as happy that the installation process doesn't partition
all the disks itself, by default.  I'm going to install 2.2.1 on
my workstation tomorrow, and I sure don't want to see an installation
script stomp on the data I'm saving on hd2.

>A default of 16 maximum
>ptys is also bad, as is having to create them one at a time.

I agree with both points.  There should be a utility to do all the
'devices' stuff from batch files, like the 'dsldxprof' program for
Distributed Services.

>I find it
>amazing that online manual pages are a seperate product ...

I found it annoying that my IBM sales rep told me they were available
only for AIX/370.  Has anyone else bought them?

>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.

Either the 'minidisks' command or the diagnostics diskettes would have
told you that you had three drives.  The manuals have been pretty poor
in the area of cross-referencing.  They seem to be getting better.

>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 advised not to try an incremental upgrade from 2.2 to 2.2.1.

>I was once told that 2.2.1 would do NFS -- is true?  Is it
>a seperate product?

Yes, and yes.  It's too bad that NFS is so well-entrenched as a
file-sharing standard, because Distributed Services is nicer
in some ways.  I may run both.

	Chuck Karish	karish@denali.stanford.edu
			hplabs!hpda!mindcrf!karish