ULTRIX 32 info needed

[Mark Weiser]

> I would like to hear some comments on ULTRIX, DEC's supported version
> of 4.2BSD, especially from people who have used it themselves.  Have you
> been happy with its performance?  How easy is it to reconfigure the
> binary-only distribution?  How are its software support plans?  Does
> DEC keep up with the bugs reported here and at Berkeley?
> /Steve Dyer
> {decvax,linus,ima,ihnp4}!bbncca!sdyer
> sdyer at bbncca.ARPA

We bought Ultrix for our 750's.  Performance was identical to 4.2
(which isn't surprising...), except that the RA81 driver bugs of
vanilla 4.2 were missing.  Reconfiguring using the binary was straightforward--
part of DEC's rewriting was to make this work.  So far we have seen
no software support other than pretty manuals.  The DEC field installation
force let us install Ultrix ourselves since we knew more about it than them.
We have gotten no software upgrades so far.  I don't know how many if
any of the many many bugs reported since 4.2 release were incorporated 
into our release of Ultrix (but the RA81 driver was fixed).  Our source
code for Ultrix hasn't arrived yet so we haven't had a chance to check.
(Because of delays in getting the Ultrix source we switched to the BRL
version of 4.2 after about a month, and are still running that.)


-- 
Spoken: Mark Weiser 	ARPA:	mark at maryland
CSNet:	mark at umcp-cs 	UUCP:	{seismo,allegra}!umcp-cs!mark
U.S.: Computer Science Dept., University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742