Opinions wanted on best UNIX for networking

[Rich Braun]

pss610 at unhd.unh.edu (Paul S Secinaro) writes:
>We have been considering several options for creating a small Ethernet
>here in the lab.  ... we have sort of drifted away from the choice
>of Novell Netware 3.11 for a server.
>I'd appreciate hearing peoples opinions on what they would choose.  Is 
>TCP/IP an appropriate choice for a small network?  Seems kind of like 
>overkill, with all the overhead for routing information, etc.
>How about pricing?

It depends on how much flexibility you want for each user.  I've done
quite well by my boss here at Kronos, setting up a low-budget TCP/IP-
based LAN for about ten users who each have a 386 PC.  Also on the LAN
is an IBM RS/6000; I haven't yet hooked up an AT&T 3B2 or an NCR Tower,
because the respective vendors have rather uncompetitive TCP/IP offerings.

The RS/6000 comes with TCP/IP and NFS software as standard equipment.
SCO charges extra for each package; the commercial price is something
like $500 for TCP/IP and $400 for NFS, and you can probably get it for
less with an educational discount.  I use one of the SCO systems as a
file server, and it seems to do reasonably well.  (I don't know how it
will perform once the load gets heavy; the RS/6000 is probably better,
though vastly more expensive.)  I also run one of the DOS systems as
an NFS server, using public-domain software (SOSS).

For the DOS users, you can get CUTCP off the Internet and get remote
login capability and 'ftp' file-transfer capability for free.  That's
what we do here for TCP/IP connectivity.  PC-NFS is required only if
you want to be able to mount remote filesystems and reference them
directly from DOS applications.  There is no such thing as a public-
domain NFS client package for DOS, and the packages from Sun and ftp
Software are both pretty good at relatively low cost (compared to
NetWare, at least).

-rich