How good is Apollo UNIX? (was: O'pain Software Foundation: (2))

[Charles L Ditzel]

in article <610 at quintro.UUCP>, kts at quintro.UUCP (Kenneth T. Smelcer) says:
> Despite their reputation, Apollo has been doing a fairly good job 
> in the past few years of integrating Unix into their environment.  
> The older Apollo releases (pre-9.0) had real problems, but the current
> release (9.7) is quite Unix compatible (for both SysVR2 and BSD 4.2).
> I don't know about IBM and DEC, but Apollo has definitely demonstrated
> their commitment to Unix, and to the unification of the various flavors
> of Unix into a common platform.
I tend to agree that things have been better...however that doesn't make
them good or even marginal.
I tend to dislike the offering of two Unix systems on one machine.  You
end up with three operating systems (including Aegis) and YOU HAVE TO
USE AEGIS whether you want to or not (SR 9.7).  The simplest example of
this is with tar (to quote their man page) : [to rewind or retension]"use
the command /com/rbak with -reten or -rewind" Another simple  example
is ANY sort of system administration command, they all live 
on the Aegis side and bear no resemblance to Unix.  Incidentally the
"r" and "u" options of tar are not supported by the Apollo tape drivers.
Tar on Apollo winds up only being able to create new archives to tape,
the block length is fixed at 10240 bytes for /dev/rmt8 (and /dev/rmt12)and 
512 bytes for /dev/rct8(and /dev/rct12).

As a result if you want to change the block length you wind up having to
use an Aegis command (edmtdesc).

on a aegis sidelight...
The Aegis side of tar is a command called "rbak".   Apollo sells their
system with these 5 1/4 floppies and you can use the rbak command to 
write to the floppy however they have a wonderful disclaimer in their
docs cautioning you that error detection (during reads and writes) 
with rbak and floppies is "poor". They tell you not to place any
critical or unrecoverable data on the floppy.

(I suppose you can use their mtvol command but it winds up having
a different disclaimer about dmtvol being necessary...and i have
always guessed that they might have forgot to put in the above.
Still I have always wondered why they charge for their floppy systems?)

one more aegis note :
when Apollo went to SR9.5 they introduced an ingenious bug in there
ACL command ...  Since their current Unix (SR9.7) depends on 
access control lists (ACLS) this command is frequently used
for system administration ...
anyway ACL has dual purposes 
	1) ACL gives you the access control list for a file/directory
	2) ACL also allows you to give a target file/directory a sources
	   ACLS.
Interestingly enough some people could also get the ACLS of the root 
directory easily by giving ACL a wildcard option...at 9.5 Apollo reacted
to some Usenet people that trashed their systems using ACL...now they
put the disclaimer "DO NOT, HOWEVER, DO $ acl /... (anything) AS THIS 
MAY RENDER YOUR NODE UNUSABLE."

We find the mapping between Aegis and Unix is less than perfect and on occasion
we wind up living in a permissions no-mans land...where a user account
may be myseriously owned by lpr or some such nonsense...Apollo has two
kludges to repair this ...flush_cache and fix_cache.

Actually Apollo still has a ways to go ... there are lots of differences
(look at chmod on Apollo they've mucked with that too...something about
enhancing Unix permissions by dis-allowing x only...)  maybe SR10.0???

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Naturally My Opinions Are My Own and not my employers...