Verdict on Ultrix V2.3?

[Mark Tamura]

After hearing some negative responses about upgrading V2.2 to
V2.3 I was wondering how many people were having problems and
in what instances they were occurring.

I have Ultrix V2.2 running on a VAX-11/730 and MicroVAX II and
was wondering if I should upgrade to V2.3?

Also, anyone know when V2.4 is being released.  Is it at beta
sites already?

                 mt


[ If you are running v2.2 and have installed the patch tapes then you will
have problems installing v2.3.  To resolve the problems, reinstall the
original lat_vc.o and then install the v2.3 upgrade.  This should take
care of you as long as you are not running DECnet.  I am still looking for
information on that.

The other big problem area is fsck.  You cannot mix fsck and kernels
from v2.2 and v2.3.  I.e., you must use the v2.3 fsck with the v2.3 kernel.
The reason is that the "clean file system" bit moved to a new location in
v2.3.  The reason for that is that there is a bug in the v2.2 file system
code that is not caught by the v2.2 fsck.  By moving the bit you are
"forced" to run the v2.3 fsck on all your file systems to clean up the
problem.  But if you try to mix fsck with the wrong kernel then fsck
sets one bit and the mount(2) system call examines another and the file
system never seems to be clean.  Likewise you must use the correct standalone
system because it contains a kernel.

	-- Art Z. ]