Help: Dell SYSVR4

[Tin Le]

In article <1991Jan30.084300.13358 at egsner.cirr.com> eric at egsner.cirr.com (Eric Schnoebelen) writes:
>
>        I sat in on Dell's Sys Vr4 BOF at the Dallas Usenix last week,
>and they commented that they have had no end of trouble trying to get
>ttymon working on async lines.  They even stated that they recommend
>using getty, which is still included on all dialup async lines.  Perhaps
>the folks from Dell will offer us more...

I've gotten ttymon to work on async lines.  Even got uucp running between
it and szebra (running ISC v2.0.2 SVR3.2).  In this case, [it] is a Sony
NEWS 3710 running S5R4 v2.0.  The bugs were more likely in the async driver.
I found numerous problems in the driver.

>
>        To add a bit more meat to this posting, the Dell BOF was quite
>informative.  The developers from Dell were there answering questions,
>and commented on the number of bugs that they found in the base line
>sources from AT&T (b22, I believe).  But they also claimed (and I have
>no reason to doubt this) that release 4 is much more robust that release
                                            ????????????????
   I disagree with that!  5.3.2 (IMHO) is more stable than current 5.4
   that is being shipped out there.

>3.2.  Nearly all the bugs they found were in the BSD compatibility
>routines.  One comment (paraphrased) was "I think the people who did the
>BSD stuff had never looked at a BSD machine"

I agree 100% with that.  We found so many bugs in the BSD emulation area.
Both in the ported BSD commands/utilities and the emul libraries.  <sigh>.

>        After attending the BOF, and chatting with the developers at
>Uniforum, I would have no problems running Dell in a production
>environment around here.  And I plan on doing so in the near future.

Be prepared for lots of problems.  I have a Dell 486/33 box with their
S5R4 for a week now, and have had 2 panics (and I haven't even started
trying yet!).  There are still many problems with what they are shipping.
BTW, Dell also screwed up in their shipment.  We order a complete system,
but the machine arrived without the VGA monitor and the software was not
completely loaded (yes, folks, UNIX was only partially on the HD).

To be fair, I think the problems are also there in the S5R4 being shipped
by other vendors and not just Dell.  I've spent some time with as many as
I could at Uniforum and my impression was they all are still in beta
quality, i.e. NOT READY FOR PRODUCTION ENVIRONMENT.  Anyway, it's your
money and this is just IMHO.

BTW, there were other problems with the system we purchased from Dell.
The system booted up, but after about 10minutes, it became obvious that
the various packages were only partially loaded.  For example, in trying
to start X, I found that many of the sym-links were not setup: /usr/X11,
/usr/bin/X11, /usr/lib/X11, etc.  Worse, xinit was missing, plus other
rather important files/dirs: /usr/lib/X11/config, /usr/lib/X11/xinit.
After some investigation, I think I understand what happened.  The hard
disk was a 300MB+ in size.  They put both / and /usr in a single root
partition, and they didn't make it large enough.  So when they loaded
the software onto the disk, root filled up and the install failed.
Somehow this got past their test people and the system shipped to us
with a partially installed system <sigh>.

Hardware wise, we are quite happy with the machine.  The 486/33 is definitely
a screamer.  It's just too bad the software business was so sloppy...

-- Tin
-- 

+-----------------------------------------------------------------
|Tin Le           | tin at smsc.sony.com or tin at szebra.uu.net
|Station Zebra    |....!{claris,limbo,sonyusa,zorch}!szebra!tin