Software installation opinions needed

[Wm E. Davidsen Jr]

In article <3512 at syma.sussex.ac.uk> stevedc at syma.sussex.ac.uk (Stephen Carter) writes:

| Past operating systems I have dealt with (no names, no pack drill) have
| been what I think of as mature commercial operating systems.  They have
| been able to cope with the rigours and realities of being used and
| installed and maintained by ordinary operations staff.  (Not by Nobel
| candidates).

  UNIX is a (registered) trademark, not a monolithic product. Lots of
people run UNIX systems in production business environments who are not
remotely gurus on anything.

| UN*X is not like that, and it is about time it was.

  Sounds like you have one of the less user friendly versions. 

| I shall give three examples of what I mean.  Two close to the real
| thread of this discussion, one a bit to one side.
| 
| 1.  When the system was delivered I insisted that because it had been
| with a third party, that we wipe the discs and reinstall from
| manufacturer distribution tapes.  SO far, so good.  The basic process
| went OK, but when the system build was going on the manufacturer
| engineer had to edit (using vi) the command file.  

  Stop there. It's not all that bad. Some vendors do it with menus,
other with questions with well chosen defaults and help as a valid
answer. Having to do an edit isn't a great way to do it, and it's no a
failing in all versions of UNIX.

| 2.  We are having trouble at present with a printer that does not do a
| CR after a LF (or vice versa!).  Now we know that the control on this is
| buried in getty and termcap, but it is all in terms of bit flags that
| then have to be entered as fs:octalnumbers.

  Again, it depends on what vendor you patronize. SysV introduced some
nice lp stuff which has been fitted into some BSD derived systems as
well. You have a nice text shell script to execute when sending a file
to the printer, and you can put a stty command or whatever you need
there. Yes you need to read the manuals, but you don't need any guruship.

| 3.  (Slight aside).  REAL installations (ie ones where commercial style
| work is done - who prints your payslips dear readers) don't just print
| onto plain listing paper.  We change paper types, and we need to align
| the stationery with a test print.  If lp or lpr do it, I've not found
| it.  This is not a marginal need - it is central!

  This isn't and shouldn't be in lp or lpr, they put stuff *on* the
queue. It should be the program which takes stuff *off* the queue which
handles this. It can't be build in, because no two people want the same
thing. All the vendor can provide is the ability to interface with the
operator, printer, and filesystem. After that you write a few lines of
script or code to use the interfaces.

  Again, it depends on the vendor. Given the nice lp queueing I
mentioned before, you should have no trouble writing a few lines in the
control script to either have the operator load the paper and enable the
jobs for that paper, or have the system prompt the operator to change
the paper type (that gets old if you have a lot of jobs using various
forms).

                                 * * *

  I make no claim to have seen it all for operating systems, but I have
seen the admin for VM, MVS, GCOS, VMS, and a number of UNIX variants.
The better UNIX install procedures are the best I've seen. They are far
better than the install procedures for some popular MS-DOS software,
definitely not intended to require years of training.

  As far as install goes, if you don't do it often (I hope you don't
have to) then you consider having a consultant come in and do it. Who
cares if he works hard. Day to day operation should and can be easy. If
you don't have the inhouse expertise to make it so, and it may not be
cost effective to do so, then  hire a consultant, once, to setup the
system and put what you want in place.
-- 
bill davidsen - davidsen at sixhub.uucp (uunet!crdgw1!sixhub!davidsen)
    sysop *IX BBS and Public Access UNIX
    moderator of comp.binaries.ibm.pc and 80386 mailing list
"Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -me