crash@jc3b21.UUCP (Frank J. Edwards) (02/27/89)
From article <2650@spdcc.SPDCC.COM>, by dyer@spdcc.COM (Steve Dyer): > In article <1966@nmtsun.nmt.edu> peter@hydrovax.nmt.edu writes: >> We have been toying for some time with the idea of running 4.3 BSD on >>our RT, being as RT-AIX is not a useful operating system. >> [much deleted] Question: why is AIX not "useful"? I have found it to be very robust (to the point of requiring 30MB to install 2.1.2 with DS!) and I am quite pleased with the way that *most* BSD code compiles and runs with little or no problems (read that as 90-95% of BSD code). Having seen AIX go from 2.1 to 2.2.1 I have experienced the "painless" upgrades (compared to what I've heard about some BSD boxes :-) except that installing from floppy is ridiculous. Anyway, I anxiously await your reply... Frank "Crash" Edwards ----- "Mr Spock, where is that power you promised me?" "One *damn* minute, Admiral!"
aad@stpstn.UUCP (Anthony A. Datri) (02/28/89)
>Question: why is AIX not "useful"? I have found it to be very robust >(to the point of requiring 30MB to install 2.1.2 with DS!) and I am >quite pleased with the way that *most* BSD code compiles and runs with >little or no problems (read that as 90-95% of BSD code). I've found that our AIX machines have the annoying tendency to get corrupted, giving an "error reading iodn 16384" (or some number close to that) when trying to boot, and nothing short of re-installing seems to solve it. AIX also has really poor default partitioning. Doing a default install on an RT with 3 114 meg drives results in a total of about 70 or 80 meg used, across the drives. A default of 16 maximum ptys is also bad, as is having to create them one at a time. I find it amazing that online manual pages are a seperate product, and the elements from IBM's mainframe os's like "minidisks" instead of partitions and ocurrences of "IPL" are kind of odd. >Having seen AIX go from 2.1 to 2.2.1 I have experienced the "painless" >upgrades (compared to what I've heard about some BSD boxes :-) except >that installing from floppy is ridiculous. IBM installed 2.1.2 on our RT's, with default partitioning. We thought we just had one 70 meg drive in there until I opened the suckers up and found 3 114's. I just installed 2.2 from scratch, and it went fairly well after I figured out which of the subsets I needed. I haven't tried an actual incremental upgrade, but many, many vendors do a less than admirable job at them. I was once told that 2.2.1 would do NFS -- is true? Is it a seperate product? -- @disclaimer(Any concepts or opinions above are entirely mine, not those of my employer, my GIGI, my VT05, or my 11/34) beak is@>beak is not Anthony A. Datri @SysAdmin(Stepstone Corporation) aad@stepstone.com stpstn!aad
karish@forel.stanford.edu (Chuck Karish) (03/01/89)
In article <2854@stpstn.UUCP> aad@stepstone.com wrote: >AIX also has really poor default partitioning. The installation menu gives you the chance to change the partitioning pretty painlessly. >Doing a >default install on an RT with 3 114 meg drives results in a total of >about 70 or 80 meg used, across the drives. I'm just as happy that the installation process doesn't partition all the disks itself, by default. I'm going to install 2.2.1 on my workstation tomorrow, and I sure don't want to see an installation script stomp on the data I'm saving on hd2. >A default of 16 maximum >ptys is also bad, as is having to create them one at a time. I agree with both points. There should be a utility to do all the 'devices' stuff from batch files, like the 'dsldxprof' program for Distributed Services. >I find it >amazing that online manual pages are a seperate product ... I found it annoying that my IBM sales rep told me they were available only for AIX/370. Has anyone else bought them? >IBM installed 2.1.2 on our RT's, with default partitioning. We thought >we just had one 70 meg drive in there until I opened the suckers up and >found 3 114's. Either the 'minidisks' command or the diagnostics diskettes would have told you that you had three drives. The manuals have been pretty poor in the area of cross-referencing. They seem to be getting better. >I just installed 2.2 from scratch, and it went fairly well >after I figured out which of the subsets I needed. I haven't tried an >actual incremental upgrade, but many, many vendors do a less than admirable >job at them. I was advised not to try an incremental upgrade from 2.2 to 2.2.1. >I was once told that 2.2.1 would do NFS -- is true? Is it >a seperate product? Yes, and yes. It's too bad that NFS is so well-entrenched as a file-sharing standard, because Distributed Services is nicer in some ways. I may run both. Chuck Karish karish@denali.stanford.edu hplabs!hpda!mindcrf!karish
njs@scifi.UUCP (Nicholas J. Simicich) (03/02/89)
In article <2854@stpstn.UUCP> aad@stepstone.com writes: >I've found that our AIX machines have the annoying tendency to get >corrupted, giving an "error reading iodn 16384" (or some number close to >that) when trying to boot, and nothing short of re-installing seems to >solve it. iodn 16384 is your root filesystem. An I/O error on the root filesystem would tend to keep your system from starting, certainly an annoying thing. Once VRM and root have come up, hard errors on filesystems will usually cause FSCK failures. The usual procedure for dealing with this would be to make a backup of your root filesystem at some point, and to attempt to restore it using the stand-alone install/maint diskette, when the failure occurred. The install/maint diskette is in the install diskette set. You can also run fsck from that diskette, start the stand-alone shell, and mount /dev/hd0 onto /mnt, and chroot to /mnt or just cd there and try to figure out what is wrong. I've been running AIX on a number of machines for a fair while now. This doesn't happen to me on any of the recent disk drives, although there was a 70 meg drive that customers never saw....but anyway, I'd seriously consider running hardware diagnostics, and looking for failing parts or disk drives. I'd also consider talking to the hardware folks about trying to swap parts. If it is happening on more than one machine, well, I dunno. I'd still run diagnostics, but I'd also call defect support. New fix levels are cut frequently. > AIX also has really poor default partitioning. Doing a >default install on an RT with 3 114 meg drives results in a total of >about 70 or 80 meg used, across the drives. It should be noted that you can change this during install, and that you can change it after install by backing up that "minidisk", deleting it using the install maint disk and adding it with the same iodn, and restoring the backup. But it probably will be painful for the first time user who does not yet know their requirements, and who does not fit the defaults. Unfortunately, defaults for something as complex as space utilization by filesystem are difficult to choose such that they fit most users. Indeed, we are struggling with this problem for Watson Research's "standard" configuration, and we have come to believe that there is no set of standard defaults that will satisfy anyone. Some are less painful than others. >A default of 16 maximum >ptys is also bad, as is having to create them one at a time. Well, as you probably know, the X-Windows manual describes how to increase the number of pty's. This involves parameter changes in /etc/master and a kernel make. Some people in IBM run the devices command under 'tee', create a set of pty's, and then pipe that file to devices whenever they need to create pty's after that. I wrote a Q&D program to do it. The problem with increasing the number of pty devices by default, far as I know, is that each pty ties up system resources. Also, configuring 64 pty devices makes boot, an already painfully long process, take a lot longer. I know. cause I run with 64 pty's. >I find it >amazing that online manual pages are a seperate product, and the >elements from IBM's mainframe os's like "minidisks" instead of partitions >and ocurrences of "IPL" are kind of odd. (no comment) >>Having seen AIX go from 2.1 to 2.2.1 I have experienced the "painless" >>upgrades (compared to what I've heard about some BSD boxes :-) except >>that installing from floppy is ridiculous. > >IBM installed 2.1.2 on our RT's, with default partitioning. We thought >we just had one 70 meg drive in there until I opened the suckers up and >found 3 114's. Did you never run the minidisks command? It will tell you how many physical drives you have, how the logical "minidisks" are laid out on those physical drives, and will allow you to allocate more logical "minidisks". (Using "user-friendly" dialogs and full screen menus...) >I just installed 2.2 from scratch, and it went fairly well >after I figured out which of the subsets I needed. I haven't tried an >actual incremental upgrade, but many, many vendors do a less than admirable >job at them. I was once told that 2.2.1 would do NFS -- is true? Is it >a seperate product? Our usual tack is to install all of everything. 2.2.1 will support the NFS product, which as far as I know, is separate. -- Nick Simicich --- uunet!bywater!scifi!njs --- njs@ibm.com (Internet)
fink@nucthy.physics.orst.edu (Paul Fink) (03/03/89)
> AIX also has really poor default partitioning. Doing a >default install on an RT with 3 114 meg drives results in a total of >about 70 or 80 meg used, across the drives. A default of 16 maximum >ptys is also bad, as is having to create them one at a time. I find it > I have no great love for RT's, but AIX is a fine System V Unix. If you don't like the default partitioning change it. I have never installed a Unix, and not reworked the partitioning. I figure that's my job. I have only set one RT with AIX, others with BSD, The AIX machine was much easyer to setup. Your using more that 16 ptys? Wow, that must be a slow moving RT. ____________________________________________________________________________ Paul J. Fink Jr. Internet: Oregon State University fink@PHYSICS.ORST.EDU Department of Physics Phone: Corvallis, Oregon 97331 (503) 754-4631
usenet@cps3xx.UUCP (Usenet file owner) (03/03/89)
in article <9199@orstcs.CS.ORST.EDU>, fink@nucthy.physics.orst.edu (Paul Fink) says: > > Your using more that 16 ptys? Wow, that must be a slow moving RT. > The original poster was talking about a Model 135. Supposedly they can supoort up to 20 terminals comfortably. We used to have a Model 125 with three terminals connected via RS422 and could notice performance degradation if we were all working intensely. John H. Lawitzke UUCP: Work: ...rutgers!mailrus!frith!fciiho!jhl Michigan Farm Bureau ...decvax!purdue!mailrus!frith!fciiho!jhl Insurance Group ...uunet!frith!fciiho!jhl Home: ...uunet!frith!fciiho!ipecac!jhl
aad@stpstn.UUCP (Anthony A. Datri) (03/05/89)
In article <9199@orstcs.CS.ORST.EDU> fink@nucthy.PHYSICS.ORST.EDU (Paul Fink) writes: >I have no great love for RT's, but AIX is a fine System V Unix. If you don't >like the default partitioning change it. I have never installed a Unix, and >not reworked the partitioning. I figure that's my job. I have only set one RT >with AIX, others with BSD, The AIX machine was much easyer to setup. I agree that reworking the partitioning is a reasonable part of the installation. I would still prefer that it wouldn't spread the system partitions across two or three disks, but that's a preferences. What I was really commenting on was that the installation procedure left all that disk space unallocated. I think that a default behavior should set things up in some semi-reasonable way, and that while the option for customization is present, that if a user chooses not to use it (in my case, I didn't know I could) it should use disk space not allocated to system stuff for user directories, or even /foo. I would think that if someone is going to want to customize, they're going to do it from the start. Ie., someone with manuals who does a default installation probably isn't going to run the minidisks command to customize later. >Your using more that 16 ptys? Wow, that must be a slow moving RT. I used to hate RT's, but that was from experience on non-APC machines with 4 or so meg of memory at CMU running Andrew. The two we have here seem to have APC's and 16 meg of memory each. There are things I don't like about AIX, but I don't mind the machine itself. It seems reasonable, but then, I don't know how much IBM charges for them. I'd like to know why cc pegs the CPU, though. -- @disclaimer(Any concepts or opinions above are entirely mine, not those of my employer, my GIGI, my VT05, or my 11/34) beak is@>beak is not Anthony A. Datri @SysAdmin(Stepstone Corporation) aad@stepstone.com stpstn!aad
sauer@auschs.UUCP (Charlie Sauer) (03/06/89)
In article <560@Portia.Stanford.EDU>, karish@forel.stanford.edu (Chuck Karish) writes: > In article <2854@stpstn.UUCP> aad@stepstone.com wrote: > >A default of 16 maximum > >ptys is also bad, as is having to create them one at a time. > > I agree with both points. There should be a utility to do all the > 'devices' stuff from batch files, like the 'dsldxprof' program for > Distributed Services. Yes, this should/will be better. Here's how I personally deal with this now: 1. use 'tee /etc/addpty.cmds | devices' to create a script of commands to feed to devices. There is some minor trickiness here, so I'm embedding a uuencode of my version of addpty.cmds: begin 644 /etc/addpty.cmds ;82!P='ED978@<'1S(`H*;F\*"@H;6S`P,W$* ` end Then use 'devices < /etc/addpty.cmds' up to the limits of your desires or the configured maximums. Note that this sort of strategy also works with other menu oriented commands, e.g., ndtable, that don't have a non-menu version. If anyone wants my ndtable scripts, I'll be glad to mail/post them. 2. If you want to go above the default maximum of 16, in /etc/master up the ptybuffers value and the maxminor values for uptc and upts. Rebuild the kernel (cd /usr/sys;make), put it in place and shutdown/reboot. Then add additional stanzas to /etc/ddi/pty for the new pty's. ("Yes, this should/ will be better.") > >I find it > >amazing that online manual pages are a seperate product ... > > I found it annoying that my IBM sales rep told me they were available > only for AIX/370. Has anyone else bought them? man pages come by default with AIX/370. With the RT, they are a separate $50 PRPQ, with the number I and others have previously posted: P91026. Charlie -- C.H. Sauer IBM Advanced Workstations Div. !'s: cs.utexas.edu!ibmaus!sauer 11400 Burnet Road, D75/802 @'s: @CS.UTEXAS.EDU:sauer@ibmaus.uucp Austin, Texas 78758-2502 !&@: ibmaus!sauer@CS.UTEXAS.EDU (512) 823-3692 vnet: SAUER at AUSVM6