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Path: sserve!manuel!munnari.oz.au!spool.mu.edu!yale.edu!qt.cs.utexas.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!ames!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!zazen!schaefer.math.wisc.edu!junikka From: junikka@schaefer.math.wisc.edu (Jari Junikka) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd Subject: Re: What will other UNIX OS vendors do? Message-ID: <1992Aug8.022242.15149@schaefer.math.wisc.edu> Date: 8 Aug 92 02:22:42 GMT Article-I.D.: schaefer.1992Aug8.022242.15149 References: <1992Aug3.144718.5485@rwwa.COM> <807@admin.mport.COM> Distribution: usa Organization: Univ. of Wisconsin Dept. of Mathematics Lines: 47 jack@admin.mport.COM (Jack Craig) writes: >of course, no one can argue on the price issue(although a big part of >that is the packaging and support). ;) We got two StarServer S workstations running System V Release 4 Version 2.1. We've had them "running" for about nine months now. The problems have been varied, many of them I'd classify as resulting from not caring about the customers or their needs. Either you do it our way, or you don't do it. Some highlights: 1) At the time of delivery some pieces were missing like memory cards, cables etc. 2) It took over 3 months to find what happened to a 16 MB memory card. 3) The system came misconfigured. Among other pronlems were: a 32MB system had 4MB swap. After much troubles [calls to the hotline etc] we found that a disk was incorrectly configured with the parameters used for StarServer E. We were supposed to receive a system ready to run. 4) The documentation sucks. A very small part of it is as regular man pages, most of it in AT&T's new innovation called Information Delivery System (IDS). IDS per se isn't bad. Actually, it's a big improvement over man pages, but when you have to go through several screems before you're able to search for the information you need, it gets tiresome. Also, some parts of the system are only documented in printed manual pages. And of course, there are missing manual pages and things not documented anywhere. In addition to all this, some of the documentation is out of phase with the software. [I could go on, but why bore everyone...] I'd say the year of support we got hasn't been worth what we paid ($0) for it, Now, they're trying to push us to buy a service contract. They must be kidding. I found solutions to our problems more often from the net, then from their engineers. In summary, I'd take a free implementation of Unix with net's support over theirs any day. I really doubt, if they're even interested in doing it right. Maybe it's corporate programming.... jari