A/UX experiences

[Martin Ewing]

In article <1991Mar5.204628.13766 at usenet.ins.cwru.edu> chet at odin.INS.CWRU.Edu (Chet Ramey) writes:
>I have the chance to look at some Macs running A/UX as a platform for
>student use here, and I'm interested in the reactions of those who
>are already using them.
>
>I've heard about the NFS problems -- after a couple of days reading
>this group, they're hard to miss.
>
>I'm interested in any impressions people have of this combination as a
>student platform, and particularly in how well it fits into a heterogeneous
>TCP/IP network.
>
We have been spending the last couple of months setting up a number of A/UX
machines for student access.  We are using a Sun 4/390 NFS server for users'
personal directories about a half mile away.  In addition, we are using
a NeXT (older model) as a read-only software server on NFS.  We have had
absolutely no NFS technical problems!  (We do have administrative hassles,
though, since the Sun is not under our immediate control.)

The real problem with our installation, which was not anticipated, is that
A/UX machines are not robust in the face of student users.  What do I mean?

-People are used to powering off Macs whenever they run into problems, like
hung machines, or when they leave the lab.  We find that there's about a
1 in 3(?) chance of corrupting our 80 MB hard disk when they do this, and
we've ended up reloading the whole system several times.  

-With the default setup, people can get into single user mode and start
trashing the root file system.  Nobody's done this yet, but some people do
like to run the machines in MacOS mode for some reason.  You can't do much
with MacPartition!  (We have removed the more dangerous commands from the
"bin" folder and have write-protected MacPartition.  People still could
ruin the system by booting from a floppy and trashing the HD.  Paranoia
is catching!)

-We permit remote logins, but there seems to be no good way to regulate
how many logins there should be, or whether they should be allowed at all
if there's a local "Mac" user.  (I suppose we can do some tricks with login
scripts here.)

-Macs don't reboot automatically if power is interrupted.

The first and second problems are the serious ones.  The best cure for this
would be to have the option of DISKLESS A/UX MACHINES that can boot from
a server.  Perhaps it would be still acceptable to use the local disk for
paging.  Besides bullet-proofing a student installation, this would save
us money in hardware.

Generally, we're still impressed by all that A/UX can do.  Students grouse
that it's pretty slow by MacOS standards, but they don't fully appreciate (?)
Unix yet.

The problems with A/UX in a student environment are similar to the problems
we have running MacOS on Mac IIs for students.  Apple has never solved the
problem of security in a multi-hostile-user environment!  Life was simple
when we only had to worry about floppies.

We would like to hear from others who are facing similar problems.

Martin Ewing, Yale Science & Engineering Computing Facility
Ewing at Yale.edu