Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!pacbell!ames!mailrus!ukma!gatech!itcatl!robin
From: robin@itcatl.UUCP (Robin Cutshaw)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.rt
Subject: Re: Inquieries for "Bad Aspects" of the RT
Summary: AIX on the RT
Message-ID: <301@itcatl.UUCP>
Date: 3 Dec 88 01:57:48 GMT
References: <7963@dasys1.UUCP>
Organization: Disc Access Products Group, Inc., Atlanta, Ga.
Lines: 118


I have been using AIX on the RT for development and networking for
over a year.  Our organization is *very* close to IBM (as an IMAP, CSP,
and MAP for various products) and we are making the RT a major part
of our product offerings (along with some bigger iron).  I've included
a summary of our experience on the RT up to this point.

The RT Hardware:

	Simple to install if you don't have to open the box.  If you have
to add a board or two it's not simple to figure out which slot that it
can or cannot go into.  The multi-protocol adapter comes by default
with DMA channel one strapped which will not work with SNA services
due to conflicts with the ESDI defaults when using S1.  Switch it
to DMA channel five and it will work.  If you do want to use channel
one you will have to use the setdma command for the ESDI controller
(which is not easy to find in the reems of documentation).  This will
drop DMA support for S1 however.
	Some of our installs reached a snag when every time that we tried
to print something the machine would crash.  This got to be a pain
because the qdaemon cranks up when you reboot and causes anything
queued to start again.  The error messages could not point to the
problem, so with nothing to lose an SE changed the 4MB fast memory
and it solved the problem (go figure).
	The machine can get confused as to where it's console display
adapter is.  If you change it's location from say slot 4 to slot
2 it won't find it the first time if you put something else in
slot 4.  Even if you clear slot 4 you are stuck and have to switch
to 5, reboot and tell diagnostics that you swapped it, then back
to 2 for the same thing.  This happened to two different machines.
	IBM hardware support wasn't sure why one slot was different
than another on the RT.

AIX:
	2.1.X was a joke.  Many, many bugs.  2.2 fixed most of the bugs
and added many new and wonderful features (rlogin, rwhod, etc).  I
hope they fold all of the BSD based network daemons into inetd to
clean things up a bit.  2.2 is fast, it runs rings around our uVAXII's
running Ultrix 2.3 in CPU and file access benchmarks.  If they would
clean up the BSD support and add job control we would probably convert
from our VAX's to the RT's as our primary development environment.
2.2 added much better BSD library support and fixed lot's of BSD bugs
but is still not quite there.  Async for multiple dialups is still
very fragile and needs much work (no RTS/CTS flow control for high speed!).
	Long file names would be wonderful!
	Rlogin swaps CR's and LF's which can get confusing as to when to
hit ^J's instead of Enter's.  If you rlogin from a non AIX environment,
vi won't work (a bug in their curses support).  A workaround is to
rlogin back into yourself (potentially dangerous these days) and it
will fix itself.

X:
	X-windows release 1.1 has many, many bugs (even with the updates).
Try echoing [x while in xterm and watch the core dump.  We
should get our 2.X release next week (X11R2) and hope to see lots of
working code.

SNA:
	Not for novices!  Don't do this without a license (dog, that is).
If it hadn't been for our high powered scope I would have never figured
out all of the right parameters (this is probably the worst set of
documentation in the whole AIX doc release).

SUPPORT:
	The worst.  When you call, it's "AIwhat, on an Rwhere?".  This should
improve with more customers.  The front line Austin support cannot (and
would rather not) answer any semi-technical questions.  The first response
is always "have your SE come out and help with that problem".  That's
probably OK for many customer installations but, we trained our SE on
the RT.  She had never seen one before our account hit her desk.  This
newsgroup will probably turn out to be the best forum for problems and
questions.
	I have seen improvements as of late in the support.  IBM has 
recently put a major emphasis on RT sales and they seem to be gearing up.
It now takes two to three months to get delivery due to the larger
demand.  The marketing rep's get major brownie points (Merps in the
lingo) for RT sales so we should see more activity and hopefully
more expertise.

  :-)

Even with all of the above observations and problems, we are still
very high on the RT and AIX.  I attended a foo-foo AIX forum for
IBM's closest personel software developers and xMAPs, and it was
made very clear that AIX is going to be a major strategic direction
in the coming years.  Major discounts and bene's are available to
software developers if you know where to find them.  The upper
management in IBM is pushing hard at this AIX thing and it's starting
to seep down into the hords.  We feel that with our head start in
the AIX world we will do well in most of IBM's hardware environments
in the future.

There are many, many neet and wonderful things to explore on the RT
under AIX.  Our APA8C works very well with X even though it has
limited colors and resolution.  Metafont is included along with
several different fonts.  Graphics support libraries are quite
extensive (even though there is nothing that can show them off).
Async SLIP support seems to be there (we haven't tried it yet).
With X for DOS around the corner, my programming staff will have
X servers instead of VT320's to do their work on the RT's and on
the VAX's.  Distributed services will help to grow our client
bases when they max out any given RT.

For us, the future looks good with AIX (both on the RT and on smaller
and larger hardware in the future).  The performance will continue
to improve with the micro-channel and on-board CPU cache.

This group has the potential to help both the first time users and
the experts.  We have an excellent resource for question and problem
resolution as our ranks grow.  I offer what little help I can give
to anyone comming up in the ranks...

robin

-- 
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Robin Cutshaw		{gatech,rebel}!itcatl!robin
Disc Access, Atlanta, Ga.  (404)261-1264   (formerly ITC)