Some A/UX questions/thoughts/topics for discussion

[Forrest E. Lumpkin]

Below is some background of our workgroup and how we hope some day
to use A/UX. If you don't care about this background and are only
interested in my A/UX questions skip everything between the dashed
lines :-)


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I've been dabbling with A/UX 2.0 here at work to determine if
we should upgrade all of our networked macs from
MAC OS to A/UX. Right now it seems that A/UX 2.0 is about 80% to
90% of what we want before we go ahead and spend the time and effort converting.

To explain this assessment let me give some background of our
work group. We are a group of scientists at NASA Ames doing
research in hypersonic CFD (computational fluid dynamics).
For the most part our work entails developing and employing
computer models to study the physical models in which we are
interested. We therefore use large amounts of computer time
on CRAY supercomputers and do our development in FORTRAN. Before
I get flamed for admitting that I'm a FORTRAN user keep in mind
that we are scientists first and computer users second. (Also the
best optimizing compiler for the Cray's vector architecture is
the FORTRAN compiler.) On each scientist's desk is a MacII which is
used for file editing, some simple graphics work, document preparation,
as well as other general productivity tasks. We also have some
SGI high end graphics workstations as well as a Sun 490 file server.

Our interest in A/UX stems from the fact that all the
machines in our network other than the Macs use some version of Unix.
I therefore feel that A/UX has the possibility of making our work environment
more heterogeneous (i.e. easier networking?, NFS support, etc.) as well as
providing at the local level all the power of Unix for such things
as managing files ( the Mac OS is very poor for managing large numbers
of files - I have found Unix with its filters, pipes, shell scripts, regular
expression pattern matching, and shell metacharacter pattern matching to
be ideal for managing large numbers of files).

The reasons why we
have not abandoned the Mac OS are:

1) budgetary - we have mostly MacII's with a few IIcx's, so we well need
   hardware upgrades to run A/UX. As the funds become available we are
   slowly either replacing the MacII's or upgrading them so in time
   this constraint will disappear. (There is also the matter of buying
   an A/UX site license for 20 or so Macs - hopefully that is not
   going to be 20 times the $700 or so we payed one copy :-) )

2) since we are scientists, not everyone in our group has the technical
   knowledge (or for that matter the desire) to become Unix system administrators.
   On the other hand managing the Mac OS is much easier in comparison and
   most of us are up to that task. The installation program that comes with
   A/UX 2.0 is the type of thing that will change this situation (although
   that program seems to have a few bugs as well as the bugs in HD Setup
   which hopefully will be worked out
   in future releases). When more user friendly tools for A/UX system admin.
   become available then I feel that most of us will not feel intimidated
   by the UNIX system administration task.

3) Everyone here likes the ease of use of the Mac OS. It is very likely that
   when/if we switch to A/UX many users will remain in a primarily Mac OS
   mode (i.e. using the Finder under A/UX) and resorting to Command Shell
   only when the ``extra power'' of the shell is required.


--------

Given the above background I have a few questions/comments to pose
to the A/UX community.

1) Will future releases of A/UX (2.0.1??) resolve the problem( undocumented feature:-) )
   of only one Mac partition per physical device (hard drive).

2) Are user freindly A/UX sys. admin. tools in the works? Would other A/UX users like
   to see such tools/applications? (What I am suggesting is ``Maclike'' programs
   to do things like add/delete users, configure printing setups, create and
   mount file systems, etc.)

3) Will future versions of the Mac OS and A/UX merge even further? Two or
   three years down the road will one be able to ``ls'' his/her MacOS
   files from Command Shell (I know that this will require a MAJOR rewrite
   to the Mac OS file system, maybe something that could occur in System 8.0.
   Such a file system change in the Mac world is not unprecedented - there
   was the MFS to HFS evolution)? Is such a strategy something that the
   A/UX community would like to see? Is such a  capability so technically unfeasible
   that it is never likely to occur?

Let me conclude by saying I think Apple has a great product in A/UX 2.0; although
I don't think it is quite mature enough for our whole workgroup. I'm going
to continue evaluating A/UX on our one evaluation machine and I look forward
to new advances on the A/UX front.


Dr. Forrest E. Lumpkin III
Computational Aerothermodyamics
NASA Ames Research Center
Mountain View, CA
email: lumpkin at corvus.arc.nasa.gov