A/UX SCSI driver?

[Tony Cooper]

In article <24765 at well.sf.ca.us>, nagle at well.sf.ca.us (John Nagle) writes:
|> 
|>      I'm starting to install A/UX, and I've been informed by American
|> Peripheral Systems (the disk drive maker) that the disk formatter/
|> partitioner shipped with their drives is NOT compatible with A/UX.
|> 
|> by Quantum), I got a response along the lines of "well, that's what
|> you get with those bargain-basement drives..."
|> 
|>      The installation procedure for A/UX is certainly impressive.

Getting A/UX to work consists of three parts: 1) partitioning, 2) installation,
and 3) configuration. Apple says part 1 is the responsibility of the drive
manufacturer. If you buy a drive that you cannot partition then you shouldn't
have bought it. But that's no problem - use Silverlining. 2) is easy whether
you install from floppy, tape, CDROM, or buy A/UX installed. All you do is
run the script and wait (or insert floppies).

So 1) and 2) are easy. It's 3) that is not. But now we are talking about UNIX
and not specifically A/UX anymore. So the rest of this discussion belongs in
comp.unix.admin. 

So as far as A/UX is concerned, buy a drive/formatter combination that works
and then installation is easy.

What can Apple do for part 3) to make it easy? Well the newconfig command 
makes much of this much easier than for other UNIX's. Most other UNIX's
have everything installed and so newconfig is not required. Adding extra
modules is then a pain so I prefer the newconfig approach. Adding extra
software is real easy - just type finstall. So Apple has made configuration
as easy as I think they can. Fiddly bits such as editing /etc/hosts, 
/etc/resolv.conf, ... (including that dastardly sendmail.cf) are difficult
to automate. But things like adding printers, modems, etc should be done
with scripts or programs eg "newperipheral modem modem_port", 
"newperipheral laserwriter remote machine.site.edu" "newperipheral drive
scsi1",
(which automatically scans the drive for A/UX partitions and mounts them in
order as /usr1, /usr2, ... and fixes ptab and fstab etc) etc.

Apple A/UX programmers write good scripts so this kind of thing should not be
too difficult. The reason I say that they write good scripts is that the
ones I have seen seem to do a good job of checking that things are OK and
covering special cases etc. Just take a look at the finstall script. 1350
lines just to install software from a floppy. Apple scripts are the best I
have ever seen. Some more of them for the configuration process would really
be a boon and make A/UX even more unique among UNIX's.

Tony Cooper

Idea: "newperipheral drive scsi1 simcity" checks for the existence of a drive,
if it does not find one it sends out a fax to order one, unpacks the drive
when it arrives, installs simcity, and plays a few games to check that every
thing is OK.
arrives, plugs it in and