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- Path: sparky!uunet!pipex!bnr.co.uk!uknet!rook.ukc.ac.uk!eagle.ukc.ac.uk!gjap
- From: gjap@ukc.ac.uk (G.J.A.Paul)
- Newsgroups: comp.sys.sun.admin
- Subject: Re: SPARCclassic and SunOS 4.1.x
- Message-ID: <2613@eagle.ukc.ac.uk>
- Date: 15 Dec 92 18:31:26 GMT
- References: <Bz4D02.DD7@news.fai.com> <1992Dec14.071012.10498@zip.eecs.umich.edu> <1992Dec14.084639.18266@fwi.uva.nl>
- Reply-To: gjap@ukc.ac.uk (G.J.A.Paul)
- Organization: Computing Lab, University of Kent at Canterbury, UK.
- Lines: 47
- Nntp-Posting-Host: eagle.ukc.ac.uk
-
- (Newsgroups line trimmed)
-
- In article <1992Dec14.084639.18266@fwi.uva.nl> you write:
- >As for that SysV thing, why is it that people value to 5-10 year old
- >technology (4.3 BSD) over a much more modern Unix (Solaris 2.x)?
-
- Because the technology is better in 4.3BSD. Even Solaris 2.1 has an
- antiquated feel about it. Everything is bloated and complicated and
- doesn't lent itself to `remote administration' -- e.g. stupid
- screen-based interfaces to do system administration. Yes I know that
- deep down it is just writing files, but the program interface to those
- files isn't publicised.
-
- Sun has done us existing customers no favours. The system
- superstructure has taken several steps back and they've offered no
- assistance in the move. We've had to buy a development machine in
- order that we can start on the enormous amount of work required to
- migrate. And the end result will be worse; maybe the users won't
- notice any differences, but the administrators will be tearing their
- hair out.
-
- >If and when you get 4.4BSD, you would hardly recognise it as BSD
- >and you would have to do as much porting from SunOS 4.1.x to 4.4
- >BSD as you have to do now to Solaris 2.x.
-
- Indeed so, at least from an application programmer's point of view.
- Most established applications will already have been moved between
- different versions of SunOS and even different versions of Unix.
- But the difficult area is system administration; an administrator is
- suddenly confronted with a wildly different set of tools. And whilst
- an application developer might just be able to hack a few lines of
- code and link against a compatibility library, the changes in working
- practices for an administrator are not well understood. It may be all
- right for you, but we've been running Unix since 1976 and we've
- acquired a fair amount of infrastructure in that time. Sun can't tell
- us how to migrate (say) our user accreditation system, which covers
- various flavours Unix, VMS, printer accounting, and other systems.
- Everywhere we look there is something more that Solaris 2.x breaks.
-
- Note that most of the good bits in SVR4 came from Berkeley. Note too
- that the reason that many people bought Suns in the first place was
- because they were BSD + some other bits which you could ignore (and
- have done quite successfully for many years).
-
- Just my opinions,
-
- Godfrey Paul
-