OT: SCO Forum

[Brian K. White]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Bill Campbell" <bill at celestial.com>
To: <filepro-list at lists.celestial.com>
Sent: Friday, June 23, 2006 6:21 PM
Subject: Re: OT: SCO Forum


> On Fri, Jun 23, 2006, Fairlight wrote:
>>Only Bill Campbell would say something like:
>>>
>>> While we support several different flavours of Unix and Linux, the 
>>> systems
>>> we build are all on SuSE Linux Enterprise 9 because Novell provides 
>>> support
>>> over an extended period of time.
>>
>>*raises hand*  Yes, question about that...
>>
>>Any word on when 9.0 goes EOL?  I know you haven't been able to report 
>>bugs
>>for anything but 10.x on Novell's site for some time now, despite the fact
>>that patches continue to appear for 9.0 when necessary.
>
> I presume you're talking about 9.0 Professional, not SuSE Linux
> Enterprise 9 (SLES9).  I suspect that 9.0 Pro is considered obsolete now. 
> I
> think that Novell is supporting SuSE Linux Enterprise 8 still, which has
> the 2.4 kernels.
>
> I haven't looked at the contracts on SuSE Enterprise versions, but I think
> they provide at least 3 year support in theese, including providing 
> updated
> drivers (SLES9 SP3 just came out with full 64 bit support and updated
> hardware drivers).
>
>>I'm -still- not comfortable with the kernel level of 2.6, and after 
>>knowing
>>what the apache group did with 2.x, I'm not really looking forward to that
>>either (not that there'll be much choice if I want to stick with
>>vendor-supplied packages).
>
> I haven't had an problems with the 2.6 kernels in SuSE 9.2 Pro and later
> SuSE releases.  I gave SuSE 9.1 Pro a miss as it was the first of the 2.6
> kernel versions for SuSE.
>
>>First place I've seen a 10.x installation put it in and immediately had a
>>problem with a corrupt registry in samba (I don't know when that was
>>implemented or what the philosophy behind a registry was, but I find it
>>disturbing that it was either shipped corrupt or that easy -to- corrupt).
>
> We don't use SuSE's Samba or most of the other server software, preferring
> to use the OpenPKG versions where I have far more control, being one of 
> the
> active OpenPKG developers.
>
>>So far, I'm not thinking 10.x is quite ready from my own experiences
>>(limited) and some other accounts I've heard.
>
> I haven't seen any major issues on the various Linux mailing lists I read.
> I've installed 10.0 on a few desktop systems, without finding any major
> gotchas.  It installed on my 1999 ThinkPad 600, but I ran into interrupt
> problems which made 32-bit CardBus cards unusable so I'm still running 
> SuSE
> 9.2 Pro on that box.

I have a few 10.0 boxes in production and a couple spank'n new 10.1 boxes in 
play-with-it mode.

I can't get autolog to work on 10.any (crashes)
my 10.0 production boxes xinetd crashes several times a day so that I had to 
put "-*/5 * * * * root rcxinetd restart >/dev/null 2>&1" in /etc/crontab.
(the only change to xinetd being facetwin, just the terminal emulator part, 
is installed and used heavily on these boxes)

I had to build ttysnoop myself or use alien to install a debian package or 
rpm to install a fedora core package (any of those worked)
As with idleout, you need this a lot if you have a lot of real login 
application users, and not for much else.

Apache 2 and the suse-ified config maze is driving me crazy.
I have a perl-based ticker app that works just fine on my sco boxes with 
apache 1.x
I did have to add directives to http.conf to recognize the script based on 
execute bits and/or .pl extension and I could get it to run by both the 
standalone perl interpreter & cgi interface, and by mod_perl.
I can't get it to work under apache2 at all. Sometimes it makes the browser 
wink out of exitence, sometimes it wants to save the actual perl script 
file, sometimes it displays the source code.
The closest I might be abl to get eventually it's looking like, is by 
splitting the app up to put the perl files into their own cgi-bin directory, 
and the non-perl files somewhere in htdocs. Yuk! It's all one nice 
self-contained easily copyable directory on the sco boxes.
I bought a 1.5 inch thick apach2 bible, found the 2 pages in the center the 
dealt with perl and mod_perl, and it even claimed to show how to do what I 
wanted, and not even the simplest example command worked. That could just be 
a poorly written book that failed to say this is a general command that 
might need to be different on your distribution, and failed to say what 
distribution and version the example was known to be exactly correct for. An 
example is, regardless of if any of the httpd.conf directives are right, 
they showed a lynx dump headers localhost command that they simply said 
"this will show if perl or mod_perl is loaded..." wrong, it showed nothing 
of the sort, but enabling server-info and server-status did show it.

A former co-worker and buddy I still help with things tried to set up a dhcp 
server on 9.1 and it had a gui wrapper for the config file that provided 
context sensative pulldowns and input dialogs for all the isc-dhcpd 
dhcpd.conf settings, but it really wasn't clear at all what you were 
supposed to do. Looking at my freebsd notes and a simple sample config in a 
freebsd on line howto and editing the config file directly was much simpler 
and easier to understand. And, regardless how the config file was created or 
what was in it, the service refused to start up claiming it hasnt' been 
configured to match any installed nic, which was utterly untrue. The error 
even included the MAC that you can clearly match up in ifconfig and yast and 
see that the ip/subnet are all perfectly in line with dhcpd.conf.

In 10.x they made the gui for dhcpd much simpler, it only knows how to 
create a basic config, but it _worked_. Then you can still go edit the 
config file manually and the gui preserves all your additions, although 
annoyingly it removes all blank lines making it hard to keep the file easy 
to read. I guess you could insert empty comments.

I have an older (9.0) suse box out there that has a 2.4 kernel, idled 
(instead of autolog) no facetwin, and it's xinetd never crashes.
That 2 year old 9.0 box is putting 10.0 and 10.1 to shame for trouble free 
performance so far.
I havn't logged in to it since the initial install and training and 
customizations settled down a couple years ago.
I just looked at it now to check these details and it's in perfect health.
I did have to install an alient package to get ttysnoop here also though.

It was damned hard to find any idle-out facility for suse, but eventually I 
found they had autolog, but only in the boxed dvd.
I think the linux world just doesn't think about using linux as an end-user 
login application server they way sco boxes have always ben used.
Otherwise an idle/headless session cleanup facility would be a lot more 
important.

I am finding it harder to build random gnu things on suse than I did on osr5 
beleive it or not.
One example, I have to live with an old rsync the doesn't support options 
that all my sco boxes use and assume other boxes support by now.
I did manage to build a newer star, but now I get an error I have to ignore 
in yast every time where some other package "dar, disk archiver" which uses 
star thinks it fails dependancy.

I have a 32 port Digi serial server which I use for fax modems, which comes 
with an awsom, magic driver for sco that is effortless to install and always 
works exactly the way the directions say. If I didn't know _anything_ but 
knew how to read, I could install that driver and make it work in a few 
minutes on osr5.
Their linux driver is limited to a few versions of linux, includes specific 
directions for a few specific versions of redhat and suse (9.3 being the 
latest) and some more generic, you-fill-in-the-blanks directions that didn't 
even come close to working on 10.0. Worse, the 9.3-specific directions 
didn't work on my 9.3 even. So I have an osr5 box sitting there doing 
nothing but running vsi-fax and taking in fax jobs submitted over the 
network from all the other boxes simply because the osr5 driver for the 
hardware "just works" and was the only thing that worked even when I set up 
a suse 9.3 box specifically to conform to and satisfy the linux driver 
dirctions. Note the osr5 directions "just work" on any version of osr5 not 
just say "5.0.6"

Definitely Linux comes with significant overhead. The whole moving target 
problem is a huge problem not a brush-off problem.

Brian K. White  --  brian at aljex.com  --  http://www.aljex.com/bkw/
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