sahayman@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu (Steve Hayman) (09/14/90)
If Apollo wants departments with diverse computing environments
to embrace Domain/OS alongside Ultrix, SunOS and so on, perhaps they
really ought to make sure that the systems administrator is happy.
Maybe I have an inflated opinion of my own profession, but I have
to think that if a department hears its own system administrators
griping over and over again about how miserable a certain machine
is making their lives, they're likely to listen the next time
some workstation purchases are contemplated. Especially if all
you're looking for is a good general-purpose workstation and
you don't need some of the more esoteric O/S features.
When we bought our ring of 25 Apollo DN3000's a couple of years ago,
our salesman said that Domain/OS would be "BSD, bugs and all".
Sounds great, eh? These should mesh nicely with the other machines,
shouldn't they?
Wait until your sysadmins start grumbling that they can't use the
BSD "dump" program to backup the machine just like they can on the Suns
and Ultrix machines. Wait until they mention that their scripts for
creating new user accounts by appending a line to /etc/passwd suddenly
don't work on the Apollos, 'cause the password file is now some magic
"object".
Apollo people: Ah yes, but the registry is so much better!
Administrator: Not if it only runs on 1/3 of our machines it ain't.
I really think that if our apollos had been delivered with dump(8) and
a plain ordinary password file, we might still be using them. I could
have lived with the other quirks, and would have exploited
some of the machine's other strengths.
But as it is now, our DN3000's have mostly been replaced by
Sparcstations, and we're turning the ones we have left into X
terminals, and I doubt we'll ever buy anything labelled "Apollo" again.
Steve
--
Steve Hayman Workstation Manager Computer Science Department Indiana U.
sahayman@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu (812) 855-6984
NeXT Mail: sahayman@spurge.bloomington.in.us