OS choices [was Re: OpenBSD 2.7 is out]

[Mike Cantrell]

My job requires administration of about 60 SCO servers running SCO
OpenServer 5.0.x (my experience actually goes back to xenix). I can honestly
say that SCO is nearly as bad as Microsoft in some respects.

1) It's patching system is horrid. For instance, one patch for 5.0.2 fixed
some network bugs but after you applied the patch, you can't change the IP
address of the NIC without uninstalling the patch, and then re-installing it
after the change.
One patch (OSS497C) caused printers to start duplicating themseleves. Plenty
of other problems as well (such as breaking the compiler, etc.) When we get
a patch, we're not sure if we should load it or not... is it going to break
more than it fixes?

2) Their print system is a nightmare. LPD often dies. There's no way to
apply a print filter to a BSD/LPD style printer's print job before sending
it to the remote machine. I could actually roll with this one all day so
I'll quit now.

3) It's filesystem is screwed. EVERYTHING is a fscking link! And believe me,
those links break! They keep most everything in /opt/K/SCO and just link it
to it's standard location.

There is no practicle way to defrag a filesystem. SCO's "solution" is to
back everything up to tape, wipe out the filesystem, and restore the tape.
That scares this shit out of me. On our high traffic systems, we have to add
an extra array of disks for one of our filesystems so we can move over the
data every so often and just switch the mount point.


4) Don't get me started on it's License Manager...


5) The quote most often heard in our office "Have I said that SCO sucks yet
today?"


There's many other things that make me loath SCO but I have to give SCO
credit in some areas. I really like their SAR (system activity reporter)
utility... I also really like their crash utility. It's a tool that helps
weed out the memory image that (sometimes) gets dumped into the swap device
during a crash.

I've heard good and bad things about Unixware but I'm hoping that it turns
out well for us since our Suits don't want to move from SCO for our software
anytime soon.

Regards,
Mike Cantrell

----- Original Message -----
From: "der.hans" <PLUGd@lufthans.com>
To: <plug-discuss@lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us>
Sent: Saturday, June 17, 2000 1:53 AM
Subject: Re: OS choices [was Re: OpenBSD 2.7 is out]


> Am 15. Jun, 2000 schwäzte Nathan Saper so:
>
> > You might also want to try out SCO.  I haven't used it myself, but as
> > commercial *nix's go, I've heard that it's quite good.  Most of the
>
> My experience (thank God it wasn't much) is that SCO sucks rocks. Config
> files were in wierd places compared to Linux, Solaris and SGI (which were
> the only boxen I knew at the time).
>
> That was early in my career, so maybe I was just uninformed, but it seemed
> like a nightmare system...
>
> ciao,
>
> der.hans
> --
> #  der.hans@LuftHans.com   home.pages.de/~lufthans/   www.Opnix.com
> #  Help Jerry Lewis stamp out M$...oops that's MDA - der.hans
>
>
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