AT&T sys V R 4. and 1542B

[Dave Romig]

pjh at mccc.edu (Pete Holsberg) writes:

[previous discussion deleted]
>Never heard of Access Plus or pmxpc, but that's not the point.  Because
>of AT&T's insistence on having one of their computers, I'm trying to
>wean the College away from AT&T towards vendors that will support their
>software and/or hardware, almost regardless of server hardware.  I don't
>expect Dell, for example, to troubleshoot my system if I run Dell's UNIX
>and something goes wrong, but I do expect them to talk to me just
>because I bought *something* from them.  As you point out, AT&T will not
>talk to you unless you can produce a computer serial number, even if
>your problem lies somewhere else.

We currently have AT&T SysVr4v2.0, Dell SysVr4v2.1 and MicroPort SysVr4v2.2.
Testing the various support groups has yielded exactly the fears you expressed.
AT&T and Dell like to speak only of their own boxes.  outside of that, they
like to take the money for the original sale of software, but when it comes
to getting support, they acquire temporary amnesia.

MicroPort, however, has been a pleasure to work with regarding support.  We
try to be very specific and provide a "clean" bug report.  We are running
their SysVr4v2.2 on a Tangent 486/33 EISA, 32MB RAM with BusTek 742, 1.4GB
disk and both DAT and QIC150/250 tapes.  Tangent and Microport were a great
help getting dual protocol stacks running (OSI/Starlan + TCP/IP) over a
mixture of AT&T and Western Digital boards.  Neither vendor supplied any
of the network hardware.  Both vendors take a realistic approach to the
support job.  If we can reproduce the problem, we will try to solve it.
In return, we try to help them isolate the problem to a specific area that
they can easily reproduce.

>I wonder if that will change when NCR takes over the computer business.

Unlikely ... we've been VAR's for both long enough to suffer through both
organization's support teams.  Both vendors have support problems and
good support is the exception, not the rule.
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