AT&T 3BXXX Info Needed

[Sean Casey]

In article <11418 at brl-tgr.ARPA> jim at TYCHO.ARPA (James B. Houser) writes:
>        I would be very interested in hearing what people think  about
>UNIX  on  the  AT&T 3B-Whatever.  We may have to acquire some of these
>machines and currently all I have to go on is the BSTJ  issue.  Asside
>from  general  ideas of "how good is it", some specific questions that
>come to mind include;
>

>        1) How does the 3BXXX compare to Vaxen especially  the  11/780
>and 11/785?  Is it faster/slower, more or less reliable etc.

The 3b2 seems to generally run about 1/2 to 2/3 as fast as a Vax 11/750.
It's floating point operations, however, are embarrassingly slow.  Less
than 200 floating operations per second!


>	2) What kind of shape is the network support in?

As far as 3Bnet is concerned, the only interface is "nisend", a program to
transmit files, and whatever you care to write yourself.  TCP/IP from
Woolangong is coming, but it'll probably be a while.


>        3) Are there any plans to port 4.3BSD to the 3BXXX hardware?

I wish.


>        4) What kind of configurations make sense to run UNIX on?

We have 2 megs of mem and a 30 meg winchester drive.  We're really hurting
for disk space, and I believe our administrator is hunting for some of the
70 meg drives.  As for memory, I believe prolog had to be modified to fit
(on our vax it's got 5 megs mem and 60 meg swap space to work with).  I
haven't heard of any other problems.


>        5) What experience people outside AT&T (if there are any) have
>had with maintenance and repair?

AT&T has done all of our repairs, which have been plenty.  One of ours
kept dying so much that they replaced it entirely.  We have had
numerous problems with files getting clobbered.  We have also had some
weird panics until we recently got an update release.  One of the
things that really bothers me is their floppy drives.  They're
extremely slow, and there's about a 20% chance (5% with experience :-))
that anytime you insert the disk that the spindle will be off center.
This wrinkles the floppy a little, makes nasty noises, causes a disk
error, and makes you reach for the tranquilizers.  Ordinarily, this
wouldn't be too big of a problem, but their backup software dies on the
first disk error.  So when the 32nd disk of a 40 floppy backup of the
hard disk (takes bout 3 hours) can't write, it blows the rest of the
backup and you have to start over.  *This* makes you want to reach for
the nearest shotgun.  Anyway, that's my pet peeve.

Sean



-- 

-  Sean Casey				UUCP:	sean at ukma.UUCP   or
-  Department of Mathematics			{cbosgd,anlams,hasmed}!ukma!sean
-  University of Kentucky		ARPA:	ukma!sean at ANL-MCS.ARPA