wlyle@sjuphil.uucp (Wayne Lyle) (11/12/90)
Has anyone gone through an upgrade for 5.0d for the Pyramid 9800 series system. I had ordered the tapes and documentation and was getting ready to go ahead and do the upgrade when a chance meeting with my Field Engineer made me call it off. He said that there were certain levels of boards that were needed to run OSx5.0 and that if you didn't have these you weren't 100% sure if 5.0 would come up on your system. I wonder if RTOC ever checked this out before sending me the tapes. As it turns out I have most of the higher level board needed so I won't be delayed by much. Anyone else run in to this problem?? Anyone else even heard of this?? Wayne J. Lyle Dilworth, Paxson, Kalish & Kauffman Philadelphia, PA 19109 (215) 875-8583 /**********************************************************************\ /* DISCLAIMER: I am using this site (sjuphil) as my only link to the *| /* net. Any statements made here are not those of my *| /* employer or my alma mater. *| /**********************************************************************/ -- Wayne J. Lyle Dilworth, Paxson, Kalish & Kauffman Philadelphia, PA 19109 (215) 875-8583
sandel@SW.MCC.COM (Charles Sandel) (11/13/90)
We did the 5.0d upgrade on our 9825 quite awhile ago. Yes, RTOC told us that we needed certain rev levels on our boards (though I don't know what they were!) and made sure that we had them. We are preparing to upgrde to OSx 5.1 and are going through the same procedure of getting all our boards up to the current rev level. This is a very common procedure with Pyramid - to get the boards and COS levels up to current rev before an upgrade. Charles
karl_kleinpaste@cis.ohio-state.edu (11/13/90)
wlyle@sjuphil.uucp writes:
a chance meeting with my Field
Engineer made me call it off. He said that there were certain levels of
boards that were needed to run OSx5.0 and that if you didn't have these you
weren't 100% sure if 5.0 would come up on your system.
Yes, I was told about it the first time I called RTOC/CCSC about 5.x.
I'm currently waiting on some parts for my 9825 so I can go forward on
it; I've already got the tapes and docs. I'm told that I'm down-rev
on data caches, TPEs, and TAs for 5.1. No sweat, I understand it's
covered on our service contract. The 9825 has to upgrade first, since
it's got the fewest critical services; the others (1 98x, 2 98xe) will
upgrade immediately after. Apparently there aren't any board-level
dependencies for 5.x on the 98s.
--karlchad@anasaz.UUCP (Chad R. Larson) (11/21/90)
In article <1990Nov11.193620.3199@sjuphil.uucp> wlyle@sjuphil.UUCP () writes: +--------------- | Has anyone gone through an upgrade for 5.0d for the Pyramid 9800 | series system. I had ordered the tapes and documentation and was getting | ready to go ahead and do the upgrade when a chance meeting with my Field | Engineer made me call it off. He said that there were certain levels of | boards that were needed to run OSx5.0 and that if you didn't have these you | weren't 100% sure if 5.0 would come up on your system. Anyone else run | in to this problem?? Anyone else even heard of this?? +--------------- Yes, we took our 9845 from OSx4.4 to 5.0d without doing any hardware upgrades first. We suffered random kernel panics and machine checks (a couple per day). We were apparently one of the first sites to do this and it took Pyramid a while to conclude that CPU rev levels were the problem. They eventually swapped all 4 CPUs and data caches (20+ boards) which cured our problems. Now we're looking at a OSx5.1 upgrade. Anybody got war stories about that? -- Chad R. Larson ...{mcdphx,asuvax}!anasaz!chad or chad@anasaz.UUCP Anasazi, Inc. - 7500 North Dreamy Draw Drive, Suite 120, Phoenix, Az 85020 (602) 870-3330 "I read the news today, oh boy!" -- John Lennon
millman@jade.Sbi.COM (Phillip Millman) (11/23/90)
> > Now we're looking at a OSx5.1 upgrade. Anybody got war stories about that? > -- YUP. Here's mine. At my previous firm, we upgraded from a 9815 to a MIS 4-2. This entailed going from OSx4.4c to OSx5.1a. First of all 5.1 is at "a" revision which means alot of undocumented features. The one that caused us the most problems was the process spawned by root have a non-modifiable path. So if you have programs in (for example) /usr/localbin that calls another program in the same directory, it won't work. This is a security feature. We also had a few programs within cron fail for reasons unknown. I would wait until 5.1b comes out. (about 3 months) The other problem was that RTOC couldn't figure out what was going on 'cause nobody was supposed to have 5.1 so they weren't trained on it. ____ Phillip Millman My Opinoins are my own Salomon Bros. because nobody else will millman@moonstone.sbi.com have them.
jimmy@pyra.co.uk (Jimmy Aitken) (11/26/90)
In article <961@jade.Sbi.COM> millman@jade.Sbi.COM (Phillip Millman) writes: >YUP. Here's mine. At my previous firm, we upgraded from a 9815 to a MIS 4-2. This >entailed going from OSx4.4c to OSx5.1a. We also had a few programs >within cron fail for reasons unknown. I was bitten by this when we upgraded one of our in house systems to 5.1a. Adter scratching my head, and then beating it against a brick wall, I read the release bulletin for the 5.1 upgrade. This mentions that the file format has changed to have an addition 'user' field which was one cause of the problem. After this most of the cron jobs worked, but the ones for 'news' did not. After more self mutilation I eventually read than manual page for cron to see if there was anything that I had missed. Indeed there was. There are two security features, and the one I had missed was: 2. The group ID of the user is still a valid group and the user is still a member of that group. The 'news' group entry contained a '.' instead of a ',' as a separtor and so the group authentication was failing and hence the jobs wasn't run. Changing this to the correct format caused everything to start working again. Jimmy -- jimmy@pyra.co.uk -m------- Jimmy Aitken jimmy@pyramid.pyramid.com ---mmm----- Pyramid Technology Ltd ..!mcsun!ukc!pyrltd!jimmy -----mmmmm--- Pyramid House, Solartron Rd (+44) 252 373035 -------mmmmmmm- Hants GU14 7PL, ENGLAND - Distribution without permission frowned upon
eric@pyramid.pyramid.com (Eric Bergan) (11/27/90)
In article <961@jade.Sbi.COM> millman@jade.Sbi.COM (Phillip Millman) writes: >> >> Now we're looking at a OSx5.1 upgrade. Anybody got war stories about that? >> -- > >YUP. Here's mine. At my previous firm, we upgraded from a 9815 to a MIS 4-2. This >entailed going from OSx4.4c to OSx5.1a. First of all 5.1 is at "a" revision which >means alot of undocumented features. I'm not sure there were any undocumented features in OSx 5.1a, particularly with respect to 5.1. The release notes are redone for each version shipped, and updated with anything new. From the sounds of it, you are running into some of the security enhancements. These consisted of a number of things, including new functionality (such as access control lists) and fixing lots of existing security holes. I suspect the latter are causing your problems. This is the standard tradeoff between security and ease of use, I'm afraid. >I would wait until 5.1b comes out. (about 3 months) Just to let everyone know, we have changed our naming scheme, and there will not be a 5.1b. Instead, there will be a program update tape, or PUT. That will still be 5.1a, only labelled 901023. PUTs contain no new features, but simply the bug fixes since the last release or PUT. PUTs do go through full regression testing (unlike PTFs, which only go through stability and unit tests). PUTs come in both full distribution format, and PTF format. -- eric ...!pyramid!eric
millman@garnet.Sbi.COM (Phillip Millman) (11/28/90)
> I'm not sure there were any undocumented features in OSx 5.1a, > particularly with respect to 5.1. The release notes are redone for each > version shipped, and updated with anything new. > > From the sounds of it, you are running into some of the security > enhancements. These consisted of a number of things, including new > functionality (such as access control lists) and fixing lots of existing > security holes. I suspect the latter are causing your problems. This is > the standard tradeoff between security and ease of use, I'm afraid. > I know that most questions recieved by RTOC are TITM (They're in the Manual) so I read the ENTIRE installation manual especially the part about security fearing that something may not work. This PATH problem was undocumented and the tech helping me didn't know about it either (until he talked to one of the OS developers. I agree about the trade offs and I'm the first to advocate security on UNIX machines (after being burned by the Morris Worm). This change made a noticable difference in the ease in which our 411 shell scripts worked. ____ Phillip Millman My Opinoins are my own Salomon Bros. because nobody else will millman@moonstone.sbi.com have them.
csg@pyramid.pyramid.com (Carl S. Gutekunst) (12/11/90)
In article <963@garnet.Sbi.COM> millman@garnet.Sbi.COM (Phillip Millman) writes: >I agree about the trade offs and I'm the first to advocate security on UNIX >machines (after being burned by the Morris Worm). Just beating the long dead horse.... :-) Note that neither the "Morris worm" nor any of the other "worm-supportive" bugs in sendmail, rmail, or uucp were affected in the slightest by the C2 changes in OSx 5.1. These were all cases of software that, by design, runs in a trusted and privileged environment, but was too trusting of its data. (Those worm bugs were fixed in OSx 5.0, BTW.) <csg>