Risc System/6000

[Sam Drake]

In article <1152 at gort.cs.utexas.edu> jason at cs.utexas.edu (Jason Martin Levitt) writes:

>  Someone responded to my question about disk space requirements and
>said that AIX 3.1 will barely fit on a 300mb hard disk.  If it's possible 
>to run some kind of minimal system configuration in 120mb, will someone 
>please confirm it? BTW, they posted the reply to pc.rt or unix.aix.

Sure, fits, no problem.  If you have lots of Program Products (compilers,
extra cost applications, etc) you would probably want to NFS mount them,
along with /u.  Come on, IBM's not going to run 3 page ads in every 
big paper in the US advertising a configuration that won't boot!
Heck, if it wouldn't boot with a 120MB disk, we would have
priced a configuration with a 10MB disk ... woulda really been cheap then!
:-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-)

>            But that's not the point. The point is that this is definitly
>*not* AIX 2.2.1, it's AIX 3.1. AIX 3.1 is a big, hairy, hulking, monster
>of an operating system.  

I don't think the facts bear this one out, especially given that it
will boot in 120MB.  

>
>  My gripe is that people are quoting this $12,000
>price for a system that won't run. What is this 120mb disk for if you
>can't put the operating system on it? If it's a Sun, then it's local
>swap or other interesting things that a node which boots off of a server
>might need. Since IBM hasn't introducted any diskless technology yet, you
>have no choice, you must buy a SCSI adapter and big hard disk.

All refuted above.  Not true.  Naturally, the local disk is for
AIX itself and for local swap (perhaps a small /tmp).  Again, you're
no worse off (and in fact far BETTER off) than you would be with a
diskless configuration.  How can you lose?

Opinions are my own!

Sam Drake / IBM Almaden Research Center 
Internet:  drake at ibm.com            BITNET:  DRAKE at ALMADEN
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