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From: hyc@math.lsa.umich.edu (Howard Chu)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc,comp.sys.mac,comp.sys.amiga,comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: Boycott Apple Again -- Now about Suns
Message-ID: <409@stag.math.lsa.umich.edu>
Date: 18 Sep 88 06:20:26 GMT
References: <358@island.uu.net> <626@mace.cc.purdue.edu> <14301@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <406@stag.math.lsa.umich.edu> <620@bnlux0.bnl.gov>
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In article <620@bnlux0.bnl.gov> drs@bnlux0.UUCP (David R. Stampf) writes:
>	I wasn't going to respond to this figuring that there would be a
>huge response from Sun users, but since it wasn't posted to the sun newsgroup
>I'll put in my $.02 worth.
>
>	I've had a Sun on my desk for 4 years now, and my department has
>about a dozen.  Schools by us have Sun's by the 100's.  Compared to other
>machines, Sun's software is top notch and we frequently use the sun's to
>monitor our networks.  I really think that Howard's opinions are in the
>minority viewpoint.  So much so in fact, that it would be interesting to
>find out what he *would* recommend to his worst enemies as an alternative.
>
>	< dave stampf

I think we've seen more than enough of this topic, so I'll try to keep this
short. First of all, I'm sure many schools have Suns by the 100's. I'm sure
they're also often wondering if they'd made a mistake. I've heard many times
how Michigan State University fared, with amazing ethernet broadcast storms
and meltdowns rendering their campus-wide broadband completely unusable. We
all remember the stories of Sun 3/50's ARP requests getting shunted along
cross-country by ethernet bridges, yes? In any case, (consider this a challenge
if you wish, I know you will not be able to meet it) you cannot put anywhere
near 100 Suns on a single network, and get any useful service out of them.
The network would simply collapse under too many collisions. I don't believe
you will find any place running more than 40 machines on a single network.

Contrast this with, say, an Apollo network. Our engineering school runs over
300 Apollos on a single Apollo token ring, on two campuses spanning over two
miles. There's no such thing as a network meltdown there. Diskless nodes
don't have to have disk space pre-allocated on servers, and don't eat up
bandwidth trying to find their own internet addresses. There's no need for
special partitioning of a drive, no particular use for the mount command
except for use with NFS. No need to dedicate any piece of disk to swap space -
all disk use is dynamically allocated. All disks on a net are always accessible,
quickly and transparently. They have a bunch of Suns now too, but they can't
compare in performance to the Apollos. Using NFS, all 300+ Apollo disks are
accessible thru a single mount point on a Sun. In contrast, it's an amazing
hassle to keep fstab's up-to-date to keep all the necessary Sun disks accessible.

It would be nearly impossible to run a bunch of Suns as a well-coordinated
network without Sun's Yellow Page service. All well and good, as long as it
works, which is, unfortunately, not All the time. A Sun workstation just isn't
configured to work in a network - load it up off the distribution tapes and
it wants to think it's a standalone mini, like a big Vax or something. Its own
password file, hell, its own copy of /etc. You know how silly it is to have
25 copies of /etc/termcap or /etc/hosts online? I couldn't even keep a full
hosts file in the yp database because it was so huge it would timeout during
ypxfr updates. When 1 of the 4 ypservers went down, the silly machines were
unable to locate any of the 3 other running servers, and the whole network
was unusable. YP is supposed to be fault tolerant, and is billed as a dynamically
load balanced system, but in practice it is as inflexible and fragile as a
piece of thin glass. It was also quite disconcerting, when I went looking for
possible ways to improve the code, to note that my sources and binaries were
not the same version, even though they had identical SCCS IDs. (Different
date stamps, different object files.) And I'm one of the fortunate few to
have access to full Sun source code.

Contrast again with an Apollo network - these machines were obviously designed
from the start to operate in a distributed computing environment. Sun's network
support seems to be more of a hastily added asfterthought in comparison. The
password database, for example is dynamically updated among what they call
replicated databases. It's the same idea on the surface as yp - a few key nodes
playing host to some servers. The implementation is much smoother though. For
the password database, or "registry," there is also a locally cached registry,
which maintains a selectable history size of local users, so even if the main
registry becomes inaccessible due to a network failure, the node can be logged
into for use. Apollo's network management software is easily the most
sophisticated and mature as any I've seen. And with their filesystem, you
won't find your NFS partitions temporarily evaporating, you won't be denied
access to files that you own, etc. (This is certainly an odd problem to
appear in a "stateless" filesystem, but Sun NFS often gets confused and will
deny Joe User access to NFS mounted files that Joe owns. Usually fixed by
a couple sync commands, so it's only a minor inconvenience at worst, but
nonetheless it's a telling sign.)

So much for keeping it short. I didn't even get to talking about how much
faster Apollos are, how much more responsive the Apollo Display Manager is
than any Sun windowing system, how much more sophisticated the filesystem is,
or a lot of other points. Or Apollo's Network Computing System, with which I
can writea huge resource intensive application that will utilize all available
CPUs and disks on the network. (250 68020's can solve a lot of problems in one
helluvausmall amount of time!) So much for that. I have no vested interest in
either Suns or Apollos, I use them both all the time. Obviously I prefer the
Apollos, even though I'm maintaining 25 Suns here in Math. It's truly amazing
how many people I've encountered have only heard good things about Suns, and
never bad. Sure, they have their good points, but there's a lot of bad to be
aware of, and, more importantly, there are good alternatives to be aware of.
--
  /
 /_ , ,_.                      Howard Chu
/ /(_/(__                University of Michigan
    /           Computing Center          College of LS&A
   '              Unix Project          Information Systems