Connectivity problems With IBM

[Scott Erickson]

proot at ksuvax1.cis.ksu.edu (Paul T. Root) writes:

>I basically like the machine [RS6000] a lot. But the little things
>like [sendmail] and the ypbind/inetd problem really leaves a bad taste
>in your mouth.

I find that (on IBM RT's, PS/2's, and RS6000's) IBM tends to make
their software so that it's easy to connect with other IBM machines,
but it's extremely painful to connect to anything else!

YP (NIS), sendmail, NFS, etc. seem to work ok between our two RT's,
but it took a major struggle and lots of options to get this stuff to
work between the RT's and Suns.

And simple programs like "install" don't work right on the RS6000.
All of my favorite switches like -o, -g, -m have been changed to
upper case.  Now, I'm sure these some mode or path somewhere you can
set to get the real install, but if you login to one of these systems
with simple program source and type "make install", it won't!

Sure, each OS has its peculiarities.  I just find that AIX 3 seems to
be too different in some of the *basic* programs (like install).
I've had nothing but bad luck with the pre-releases OS's crashing the
system, and now that at a fairly stable OS is out, I can't just bring
my local software over without lots of pains.

If I was still a sysadmin with a Computer Science Department, I'm sure
I'd enjoy all of the neat new things like the access control lists and
the hypercard libraries and such, and my users would probably be just
as interested.

But being with the Geography Department, I'm just interested in getting
a system up so that my users can get some work done.  My users just
want a machine to help them with research.  They don't want to have to
deal with all of these problems on a daily basis.

I've put on my Big Blue Asbestos underwear.  If you're going to flame,
please just send mail to me.  I'll "summarize" to the net ;-)

/se
University of California Santa Barbara | (805) 961-3712
Department of Geography                | erickson at pollux.ncgia.ucsb.edu
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The opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of any
entity  either living or dead and most certainly do not necessarily
reflect those of the University of California or its Regents.
--
Scott Erickson