jim@TYCHO.ARPA (James B. Houser) (07/08/85)
Hi
I would be very interested in hearing what people think about
UNIX on the AT&T 3B-Whatever. We may have to acquire some of these
machines and currently all I have to go on is the BSTJ issue. Asside
from general ideas of "how good is it", some specific questions that
come to mind include;
1) How does the 3BXXX compare to Vaxen especially the 11/780
and 11/785? Is it faster/slower, more or less reliable etc.
2) What kind of shape is the network support in?
3) Are there any plans to port 4.3BSD to the 3BXXX hardware?
4) What kind of configurations make sense to run UNIX on?
5) What experience people outside AT&T (if there are any) have
had with maintenance and repair?
Thanx in advance for the info and if response warrants I will
summarize to unix-wizzards.
Jim Houser (jim@tycho)
-------sean@ukma.UUCP (Sean Casey) (07/10/85)
In article <11418@brl-tgr.ARPA> jim@TYCHO.ARPA (James B. Houser) writes: > I would be very interested in hearing what people think about >UNIX on the AT&T 3B-Whatever. We may have to acquire some of these >machines and currently all I have to go on is the BSTJ issue. Asside >from general ideas of "how good is it", some specific questions that >come to mind include; > > 1) How does the 3BXXX compare to Vaxen especially the 11/780 >and 11/785? Is it faster/slower, more or less reliable etc. The 3b2 seems to generally run about 1/2 to 2/3 as fast as a Vax 11/750. It's floating point operations, however, are embarrassingly slow. Less than 200 floating operations per second! > 2) What kind of shape is the network support in? As far as 3Bnet is concerned, the only interface is "nisend", a program to transmit files, and whatever you care to write yourself. TCP/IP from Woolangong is coming, but it'll probably be a while. > 3) Are there any plans to port 4.3BSD to the 3BXXX hardware? I wish. > 4) What kind of configurations make sense to run UNIX on? We have 2 megs of mem and a 30 meg winchester drive. We're really hurting for disk space, and I believe our administrator is hunting for some of the 70 meg drives. As for memory, I believe prolog had to be modified to fit (on our vax it's got 5 megs mem and 60 meg swap space to work with). I haven't heard of any other problems. > 5) What experience people outside AT&T (if there are any) have >had with maintenance and repair? AT&T has done all of our repairs, which have been plenty. One of ours kept dying so much that they replaced it entirely. We have had numerous problems with files getting clobbered. We have also had some weird panics until we recently got an update release. One of the things that really bothers me is their floppy drives. They're extremely slow, and there's about a 20% chance (5% with experience :-)) that anytime you insert the disk that the spindle will be off center. This wrinkles the floppy a little, makes nasty noises, causes a disk error, and makes you reach for the tranquilizers. Ordinarily, this wouldn't be too big of a problem, but their backup software dies on the first disk error. So when the 32nd disk of a 40 floppy backup of the hard disk (takes bout 3 hours) can't write, it blows the rest of the backup and you have to start over. *This* makes you want to reach for the nearest shotgun. Anyway, that's my pet peeve. Sean -- - Sean Casey UUCP: sean@ukma.UUCP or - Department of Mathematics {cbosgd,anlams,hasmed}!ukma!sean - University of Kentucky ARPA: ukma!sean@ANL-MCS.ARPA