benoni@ssc-vax.UUCP (Charles L Ditzel) (09/19/88)
Howard Chu writes : >Contrast this with, say, an Apollo network. Our engineering school runs over >300 Apollos on a single Apollo token ring, on two campuses spanning over two ... I use Apollos and am familiar with them so I found this entire passage interesting ... >Contrast again with an Apollo network - these machines were obviously designed >from the start to operate in a distributed computing environment. Sun's network Please note a fundamental difference between Sun and Apollo networking schemes. The Apollo network is a *homogeneous* environment. Sun's are a *heterogeneous* environment. Try sticking a silicon graphics or sun machine into their token ring system :-) Oh, yes to make them heterogeneous you use Ethernet and NFS...and their TCP/IP is less than wonderful ... ... >the password database, or "registry," there is also a locally cached registry, >which maintains a selectable history size of local users, so even if the main >registry becomes inaccessible due to a network failure, the node can be logged >into for use. Apollo's network management software is easily the most >sophisticated and mature as any I've seen. And with their filesystem, you >won't find your NFS partitions temporarily evaporating, you won't be denied >access to files that you own, etc. (This is certainly an odd problem to >appear in a "stateless" filesystem, but Sun NFS often gets confused and will >deny Joe User access to NFS mounted files that Joe owns. Usually fixed by Howard forgets about the infamous Apollo ACL problems where one day you can come in and find that the acl cache has been corrupted and the line printer can suddenly own you files. >So much for keeping it short. I didn't even get to talking about how much >faster Apollos are, how much more responsive the Apollo Display Manager is >than any Sun windowing system, how much more sophisticated the filesystem is, I work on Suns and Apollos and the DM doesn't strike me as faster...rather slower overall...especially if you are working with Unix. Also Sun offers a friendly user interface (SunView) and if you are on a 386i then you also have an Macintosh-like finder and context sensitive help...Apollo simply doesn't offer these things with their machine...(you might be able to buy delphi but it doesn't compare to the hypertext Sun help). Your DM window may come up slightly faster...but your shell prompt is slower! Unix on Sun's is not only more robust and reliable but works....which I have found can't be found to be the case on the Apollo. Apollo's Unix is odd to say the least...in some cases it depends on it's proprietary Aegis system ... I work on 9.7 and Apollo is moving to 10.0 but I have heard less then wonderful things about that. The filesystem's dependency on ACLS can create lots of problems with people that use Unix....ALSO on SR9.7 and prior there is *NO* process protections... i.e...as a *normal* user I can zap every process (including root processes) on every node of a 300 node ring!!! Nice. Their are other little things...you buy a Sun and you get a C compiler (you have to buy one for Apollos), a user interface library (on Apollos you have to buy Dialog), Color Suns allow split frame buffers so that you can run a b&w desktop and a 8-bit color desktop - two environments... if you want you could run NeWS or X in one and SunView in another...(I have yet to discover how to do this ... or if you can on the Apollo)..., NeWS runs on the Suns (doesn't on the Apollo), ... yes I develop on Apollo but I would not recommend them to a friend... the friends I have recommended Suns to are quite happy...(I like to keep my friends). When I had to sink hard $ into a workstation I bought Sun and am happy. I think Howard is definitely in the minority with his complaints about Sun... ------------------- My Opinions Are Entirely My Own.