[geeks] Shoot, I forgot about the AIX section

[Jody Stephens]

On Tue, Apr 10, 2001 at 08:32:26PM -0400, dave at cca.org wrote:
[snip]
> >Ok good stuff aside, AIX is weird. You pretty much have to use smit unless
> >you are looking for trouble. It's fairly heavyweight, but not as much as say
> >Win2K. There are lots of apps available but a lot of them are from IBM or
> >CA, which means $$$ and in the case of CA support nightmares. The hardware
> >is FRIKKEN EXPENSIVE (have I said that oo much), and nothing else runs on
> >it.

I don't know. Our vendor is trying to get us to upgrade our aging J50 
(4-procs, 60Mhz IIRC) to a 44P-270 with 2 procs (340Mhz). Price for 
our configuration ~$35,000. Just for kicks I went to sun.com to 
find the price on a similar powered machine, closest I could find was 
the 450 (the 44p goes to 4 processors). It's price was actually a 
bit more. I don't think that IBM has quite got how to sell UNIX 
workstations, it seems like they are stuck in times before
you could put together an incredible PC for under $2000. 

> 
> The one nice thing I'll say about SMIT is that it is a front-end to a
> big set of AIX-specific CLI utilities, and you can get SMIT to tell you
> what shell command your menu-driven request was converted into.

Smit (I mistyped that smut at first, I don't know if that is funny) is
good, I enjoy using it now that I have weaned my self from the idea that
editing config files directly is the Right Thing in all cases.

But it has what has to be the worst documentation. I find linux easier to 
figure out than AIX. 

An example follows from when I first started working here:
As far as I can tell, AIX has three possible places
to specify the order of sources for hostname resolution (i.e. name 
service switch). Only two of which are obviously documented in the 
man pages. I found the third one, the one causing problems, 
the one with the highest precedence, the one that smit did not 
seem to know about, by reading some obscure AIX document that 
didn't really relate to what I was doing. It took me several hours
to get that machine to resolve names from a name server. That
felt like an incredible waste of time. 

God that one pissed me off. Wading through AIX documentation
feels like swimming through jello. At least linux doesn't have much
documentation and what is there is hard to trust, hence you are 
forced to do things like reading source.  AIX has far to much 
conflicting documentation. The worst is that it seems they have 
one documentation set that doesn't have a whole lot to do with 
what your system actually contains.

All said I really like IBM, it seems that they have finally pulled it
together as a company. Doesn't seem so white shirt anymore (aside from
the physical aspect that the IBMers don't have to wear white button
downs anymore). I think it is excellent that they are putting so much
behind several major open source projects. That and service is good, 
our field engineers (or whatever their title is) are excellent.  

> 
> But I still don't like it, and will switch to *BSD the *second* it
> is available.
I concur. 
[snip]
-- 
                Jody Stephens -- (303)322-1965 x2608
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