ss@wanginst.UUCP (Sid Shapiro) (08/28/85)
We recently went through the Ultrix 1.0 to 1.1 upgrade here on our 780. There were enough annoyances that I thought I'd vent a little steam. The upgrade procedure itself went fairly cleanly - it was mostly automatic using various shell scripts. A good piece of work. However it looks almost as though DEC spend more time on the procedure than they did on the software (I know that is a great exaggeration, but my mood is not the best, so please bear with me.) When we put up 1.0, there was a bug in vipw that wouldn't allow root to have a shell entry. We SPR'd it and DEC literally refused to believe us. We eventually put up the 4.2BSD vipw which either had the fix or we put the fix in. Now with 1.1 they have fixed vipw - it only accepts /bin/sh or /bin/csh. It turns out that we would like to use another shell. Well, at least DEC acknowledges the problem this time. When we put up 1.0 we found that the supplied rc.local script edits the motd file and inserts the date of creation and the creation number of /vmunix into the motd file. Kind of cute, but the way it does it causes any other line in the file that has the word Ultrix in it do be deleted. After the upgrade we found the protection on /dev/null had changed. We also found that many other protections had changed as well. We had set all of our programs that read /dev/kmem to setgid so that kmem itself was not world readable, well they all changed back. In general we would have liked to have had a list of everything that got installed/changed so that we could check back and make sure that it all fits in with our local conventions. I have saved the best for last. When we put up 1.0 uucp stopped working. It tooks us over 2 weeks to convince the support center that uucp wasn't working and the specific way it wasn't working - we kept telling them what the symptom was and they kept looking elsewhere. Finally we got a working version from the wonderful folks at decvax (and I can't give them high enough praise - they are great people). So we upgrade to 1.1 and guess what? uucp and tip stop working. The support people are still working on this. They have been working on this for almost an entire week. It appears, when I tell them that the 4.2bsd tip works and our decvax'ed version of uucico works, that they ignore my words. They are starting to claim that our kernel configuration files must be wrong(!) This message may seem a bit harsh, and for that I am sorry. I am paying a lot for support and I don't seem to be getting it when I really need it. So in that regard this message is a flame. On the non-flame side, though I am putting out a warning to other sites about to move from 1.0 -> 1.1. Also I'd be interested hearing experiences from other sites who have already done the upgrade. Did you experience any of the same problems we did? / Sid /
cspencer@bbncc5.UUCP (Clifford Spencer) (08/30/85)
> > This message may seem a bit harsh, and for that I am sorry. I am paying a > lot for support and I don't seem to be getting it when I really need it. > So in that regard this message is a flame. > > On the non-flame side, though I am putting out a warning to other sites about > to move from 1.0 -> 1.1. Also I'd be interested hearing experiences from > other sites who have already done the upgrade. Did you experience any of the > same problems we did? As of late, I have found the feedback from the ULTRIX Colorado Customer Support Center to be top notch. We have had a few weird problems with our vaxes recently, and I have really felt that the person on the other side knew what was going on, both with vax internals, and with ULTRIX. I can't fully comment on the 1.1 upgrade script, since we had a pre-release. Ours actually did save a version of every replaced file called "name".bak or, if one elected to not overwrite the old version, "name".new. I found this to be a pain in the neck. -cliff
draughn@iitcs.UUCP (Mark Draughn) (08/31/85)
In article <994@wanginst.UUCP> ss@wanginst.UUCP (Sid Shapiro) writes: >We recently went through the Ultrix 1.0 to 1.1 upgrade here on our 780. >There were enough annoyances that I thought I'd vent a little steam. [...] > Also I'd be interested hearing experiences from >other sites who have already done the upgrade. Did you experience any of the >same problems we did? >/ Sid / Well, how about net.unix.war-stories !!!!