AIX 2.2.1 Upgrade Induced Headaches

[Tom Pitman]

Over the past weekend I had the task of Upgrading our 24 IBM RT
Workstations so that NFS 1.2 could be installed.  It was quite a
painless procedure, as it has been so many times in the past (or so I
originally thought).

I upgraded the Base Opsys to corrsvce level 1766, and tcpip was upgraded
to level 1733.  After this NFS 1.2 was installed throughout the lab.
Everything was accomplished smoothly (except for the fact that NFS
mounts that normally took several seconds to complete, were now taking
several minutes.  [AH. But I digress.  This is not my problem.]

The next day (actually last Friday), a grad student who is trying to
finish up her Thesis work using IBMs AES (Architecture and Engineering
Series) package came to me complaining that the program was continually
crashing. 

After a bit of examination, I was thoroughly confused.  I
proceeded to call IBM's AES support line, who told me that this was a
well known problem, and that the way to avoid it is not to upgrade the
OS.  I, in turn, explained that in order to have a version of NFS that
supports File Locking, it was necessary to perform the upgrades.  The
gentleman from AES support told me to call IBM AIX Defect Support and
reference a long outstanding APAR (8395), that was opened on this very
same problem.

Upon calling AIX Defect support and explaining the situation, I was
basically told the following.  The problem is not with AES nor is it
with AIX, but the problem relates to X-Windows 1.1 which is an
unsupported product.  He then told me to find two files from the
installation diskettes (/usr/lib/ogsl.txt and /usr/lib/libogsl.a) and
restore them.  I didn't find these files on the installation disks,
but I did find them on a backup tape from many Eons ago.  (Naturally,
upon restoring them, X-windows 1.1 won't even start.)

My questions are as follows:

1) Does anyone out there have slightly more up to date versions of these
   files, that I might be able to get my grubby little hands on?
   (Please send me E-mail, and maybe we can arrange something)  I was
   up to level 2705 before all the madness started...

2) How can any self respecting company offer a piece of Supported
   Software (AES) that runs on top of a piece of non-supported software
   (X-windows 1.1) and then not make any effort to try to correct
   problems that occur as a result of system upgrades?  Or maybe IBM
   should get a version of AES out that works under the new X-windows?

Back in December, you should have heard how anxious the sales people
were to get us to get 24 copies of this system in our lab.  They even
got us to purchase Ingres from Rational Technologies so that we could
run the Sturctural Component of AES.  

Today they're telling me, sorry you're screwed...

Tom Pitman (Tom.Pitman at UC.Edu)

-- 
Tom Pitman                    - Tom.Pitman at UC.Edu
Associate Systems Engineer    - tpitman at ucbeh.BITNET
University of Cincinnati      - tpitman at ucbeh.san.uc.edu
Academic Computing Services   - tpitman at ucunix.san.uc.edu