[Info-vax] New CEO of VMS Software

[Dan Cross]

In article <uneoe4$q4b$1 at panix2.panix.com>,
Scott Dorsey <kludge at panix.com> wrote:
>Dan Cross <cross at spitfire.i.gajendra.net> wrote:
>>I remember hating it.  Coming from a more "traditional" Unix
>>background, it was ... weird.  Printing, storage management,
>>man pages, the security infrastructure, all felt gratuitously
>>different for no real reason.  You were almost forced to use
>>their menu-driven management tools, but as the USENIX button at
>>the time said, "SMIT happens."  It all felt very big-M
>>"Mainframe" inspired.  The compilers were very good, and the
>>machines were fast, but the developer tools weren't bundled and
>>I remembered fighting a lot of third-party software to get it to
>>compile and run properly.
>
>Having started on OS/360, it seemed very much a throwback to that kind of
>environment to me.  Many of th AIX things were weird but were very welcome
>in a mainframe world, like real batch queue management.  The automated 
>management was awful for somebody running a single server but I think it
>might have been a good thing for somebody running hundreds of them because
>it did give a sort of central management years before puppet or ansible.

We had labs full of RS/6k's, but I found it easier to run many
nodes of DEC and Sun gear.  With Ultrix (and OSF/1) and SunOS 4,
we'd set up `rdist` and some makefiles and things to keep things
in sync, and with "dataless" configurations or even completely
diskless workstations, it was all pretty straight-forward to
keep things up to date.

My sense with the AIX tools was that they were trying to
insulate the system manager (or low-paid operators) from the
underlying system.  If your use-case is a factory floor or a
business data processing shop, that may make some sense.

>>That was all weird because, on the 6150 ("RT") machines they had
>>offered a very nice version of 4.3BSD Tahoe plus NFS to the
>>academic community; clearly, people at IBM knew how to "do" Unix
>>right.
>
>AIX wasn't designed with Unix users in mind.  I think AIX was designed to
>make things easier for people who were coming from the AS/400 or System/34
>world.

100% this.

>>Weirdest for me was the lack of a real console.  There was a
>>3-digit 7-segment LED display that would cycle through various
>>numbers as the system booted up; things that would have been
>>emitted to a serial port on a VAX (or even a Sun) were instead
>>represented by random collections of digits, and there was a
>>book you had to look at to see what was going on if something
>>hung.  Something like "371" was "fsck failed on /usr."  (I don't
>>recall if that was the exact code).  Then were was a the damned
>>key, where the system wouldn't boot if it was in the "locked"
>>position.  Which sucked if the machine crashed for some random
>>reason.  I walked into a lab one day and the entire network was
>>down because all the machines had crashed over some network
>>hiccup and the damned sysadmin had turned everything to "Locked"
>>for some obscure reason ("it's more secure.")  I guess he was
>>right: it's certainly more "secure" if no one can use the
>>computers.  :-/
>
>Again, I think this was because the intention was to run a million
>workstations with a single admin.  If something goes wrong to prevent 
>booting, you just swap the machine out with a new one and have your 
>on-site IBM FE fix it.

Yeah, but when a room full of them are crashed and won't boot,
one wonders whether the cure isn't worse than the disease.  :-)

	- Dan C.