Unix Review

[Paul]

The following is a review of a 3000UX by one of the Unix Consultants. The
system was hooked up to the Computation Center's Unix environment on the
UT Austin campus network. Which consists of a network with a huge password
database distributed using NIS use of the NFS automounter for home directories
heavy reliance on name service for networking services, little or no UUCP
traffic, and lots of different administrative domains on the same Ethernet



  From mic Tue May 14 11:43:31 1991
  Received: by ccwf.cc.utexas.edu (5.61/1.34/CCWF 1.12)
  	id AA28903; Tue, 14 May 91 11:43:24 -0500
  Date: Tue, 14 May 91 11:43:22 CDT
  From: Mic Kaczmarczik <mic at ccwf.cc.utexas.edu>
  To: amiga (Paul)
  Cc: unix-staff
  Organization: UT Austin Computation Center, Unix/VMS Services
  Subject: Re: A3000 Unix
  In-Reply-To: Your message of Tue, 14 May 91 03:17:00 -0500
  Message-Id: <CMM.0.90.0.674239402.mic at ccwf.cc.utexas.edu>
  Status: RO


  Let me first say that the machine did not arbitrarily crash on me or
  exhibit any particularly loopy behavior.  The SVR4 implementation
  seems to be pretty solid, and the Amiga extensions look reasonable.
  The large amount of additional freely-available software was a
  pleasant surprise, and I was *quite* happy to see the sources for that
  software distributed on the OS tape itself. 

  On the down side, the networking/interoperability software I was most
  interested in is somewhat lacking.  The NFS implementation worked ok,
  but I would have liked to see NIS support. I understand this will be
  available in the next release. I managed to get info about how to make
  the system use the Domain Name Service (by renaming shared libraries
  around), but it would be useful for this to be in the Amiga Unix
  manuals proper. 

  Another thing about the networking software is that the system setup
  scripts confuse the concept of a Domain Name Service domain (e.g.
  ``cs.utexas.edu'') with that of an NIS administrative domain.  The
  first has to do with uniquely identifying computers connected to the
  Internet; the second has a completely local function related to
  administering a group of systems with the same user base.  It isn't
  good or useful practice to make them the same.  For instance, what if
  two different clusters of Suns in the DNS domain ``cs.utexas.edu''
  wanted to use NIS?  They couldn't unless one of them chose a different
  NIS domain name.

  Another questionable practice to use the ``domain'' .UUCP in *either*
  the DNS or NIS context. There is no top-level Internet domain called
  ``UUCP'' -- it is purely a convention that mail systems use in order
  to make it easier to send mail.  Seeing a system boot and report a
  host name of ``localhost.uucp'' gives me the willies. 

  When it comes to performance, I don't have much to say.  I didn't do a
  large amount of benchmarking, but I did notice that trying to use
  rlogin while transferring a large file using FTP seemed a little
  sluggish.  I don't know whether it was the Ethernet card, the disk, or
  the CPU.  Since that time I have come across an excellent book about
  Unix performance tuning (``Unix System Performance Tuning'' from
  O'Reilly and Associates), which would have helped be figure out where
  any bottlenecks might have been. 

  Those are the things I can think of right now.  If you have any
  specific questions, let me know.  I appreciate you all giving us the
  chance to poke at the system.  I would be interested in seeing how the
  next release of Amiga Unix looks -- I suspect some of the above nits
  will have been addressed by then. 



  Mic Kaczmarczik			| 
  Unix/VMS Services		| Purgamentum init, exit purgamentum.
  UT Austin Computation Center	|
  remark@{ccwf,emx,bongo} 1-0251	|		    -- Latin For All Occasions

-- 
ACK!!!!
	-Bill the Cat

Amiga at ccwf.cc.utexas.edu	            .....Paul......