doug@ICASE.ARPA (Doug Peterson) (07/20/88)
I've seen a lot of negative comments about Sun's unwillingness to port (incorporate) 4.3BSD networking capabilities into their operating system. Those that are incorporated seem to also include the 4.2/3 bugs. These unhappy people are also the mainstay of the network knowledge base in the community. It strikes me that the time is near for such individuals to converge and produce the Berkeley equivalent of an OS for a distributed computing system such as a collection of diskless Sun workstations connected to a file server, which is in turn a gateway to another network. It seems that such a group could incorporate all the improvements which have been learned about both in networking and client/server situations, and produce a more performance oriented operating system, and make it available to the academic/research community. Too often (I think), I've seen postings to this list complaining of a Sun OS (problem/feature/bug), with a response from Sun to the effect that it's not an issue (ehternet connectors? name resolver?). I'm beginning to sense a slight overtone of '...If our system doesn't do what it's supposed to for you, well...' Doug Peterson Systems Manager ICASE Mail Stop 132C NASA Langley Research Center Hampton, VA 23665-5225 (804) 865-4090