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