No support for AIX/RT

[Daniel Ehrlich]

In article <5037 at brazos.Rice.edu> tunison at rice.edu (Jeffrey R. Tunison) writes:

Jeff> I attended the RISC System 6000/rollout today. While VERY
Jeff> impressed with what they have done with the new product
Jeff> family, I discovered that my fears were well-founded:

Jeff>         AIX/RT is stuck at 2.2.1

Jeff> The word from my IBM contacts was that (forced-grin):
Jeff> "No, sorry, don't expect any further upgrades for AIX/RT.
Jeff> Maybe a few APAR fixes."

Jeff> I am suprised that there has not yet been traffic on this
Jeff> newsgroup relating to this quandry. We were recently given
Jeff> 28 PC/RT's for our engineering school network and are charged
Jeff> with making the best use of them possible. I am sure that there
Jeff> are a fair number of you out there who are in the same boat.

Jeff> This board is going to become more and more important to me
Jeff> if operating system fixes and serious IBM support are going
Jeff> to wither away inside of the next six months. I will make a
Jeff> serious effort to post useful sys-admin tips/discoveries that
Jeff> I come across. I hope others will too.

Any university should have also been offered IBMs BSD 4.3 implementation for
the RT's.  This comes with full sources and BSD coded programs drop in with
minimal fuss.  The C compiler takes a bit of getting used to, but other than
that we have had few major problems, and also a few little ones.  No
different than any other OS I have ever used.

Of course AOS on the RTs is in the same boat as AIX 2.2.1, no further
development, just fixes.  But at least you have access to the sources.
Fixes to date have included, a completely new versions of sendmail (5.61),
named (4.8).  Even Sun has not yet made either of these available.  Also,
the people doing the fixes are very helpful when it comes to things like X11
R3/4 running.  You get a comment like, "You will have to realize that X11 R2
is the only supported version of X11 under AOS."  And a few weeks/months
later a patch apepars on EXPO.LCS.MIT.EDU and you are in bussiness.

If you want to ask your IBM rep about AOS you will need to mention the
following magic code "5799-WZQ; IBM Academic Operating System 4.3".  Unless
they have removed it from their books recently any university should be able
to get it.

BTW - AIX v 2.2.1 is closer to BSD than they `new and improved' AIX V3.

--
Dan Ehrlich <ehrlich at cs.psu.edu>
Voice: +1 814 863 1142	FAX: +1 814 865 3176