Bell Tech 386 SysVr3 (really a put-down of Xenix)

[Greg Woods]

In article <6643 at conexch.UUCP> enped at conexch.UUCP (Eric Pederson) writes:
>We haven't had as much luck with SCO Xenix.  I think our troubles may be due to
>poor SVID IPC support in the 2.1 Xenix for the 386.  Our Alcatel 386 (with 8
>meg of RAM, and a 150 meg ESDI drive) crashed every day at least once under
>a user load of 10 or less (on intelligent serial ports).  The applications
>used were very IPC oriented.  We got page fault-type kernel panics with
>regularity and other bizzare panics that SCO support didn't even know existed.

Now, that's more like it.  I knew someone else must have been trying to
"use" the system to the extent we did.  Unfortunately, I don't think it
is just the IPC stuff to be blamed.

>Now we run Bell Tech SysV/386 and have had no crashes whatsoever.  I miss
>the splendid system admin stuff Xenix had and the nice documentation, but
>we needed something that worked.

I don't think you're missing much.  The new AT&T documentation has MUCH
improved guides, and is more "bug" free.  The on-line help is a great
boon, though it could be more complete.  The only thing I miss is the
ring-binders.  Much "easier" to use than softcover books.

I find the sysadm stuff better than the Xenix junk, and I even use
sysadm once and a while.  Most of the Xenix scripts had weird problems,
especially if you tried anything that wasn't expected.

(I'm not sure if Bell Tech has the same stuff as 386/ix, but I assume it
does.)

>---
>Eric Pederson
>714-964-3339


-- 
						Greg Woods.

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