[TUHS] Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Marc Donner <marc.donner@gmail.com>]

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Well, it should probably be a separate thread, since the struggle went on
for a long time.  We were ultimately able to integrate the AIX 3 systems
with our network, but it involved computing the inverse FFT of the ODM on
our master machine(s) and then disting that information as a script to the
other machines.  Then we applied the updates to each machine locally.

It thus became much harder to verify that each machine was essentially
identical to every other.  Of course, part of the problem was that with
expensive licensed software it was easy to make an economic justification
for the machines being configured idiosyncratically.  We conceptualized
them as development workstations, so we wanted them to be as identical as
possible.

A while later, after I got very frustrated with IBM's failure to support my
distributed systems work, I left and went to Morgan Stanley where I ended
up running (and evolving) the Unix environment used by the Fixed Income
department.  In order to avoid single-vendor lockin we decided that ten or
fifteen percent of our machines would be RS-6000s.

We wanted, however, to have an absolutely identical environment so that any
user could sit down at any machine and have it just work.  Brian Redman
ended up being the technical lead on that effort.  We coined the motto, "If
it doesn't work on the IBMs, it doesn't work."  In a few cases we had third
party products that only ran on Sun machines.  Fortunately the X Window
System allowed us to run the binary on a Sun compute server while
displaying a window on the user's machine (Sun or IBM).  Brian streamlined
all of that to the point where there were no visible seams.

We had to standardize the user profiles, which was a bigger task than it
seemed at first.

Best,

Marc
=====
nygeek.net
mindthegapdialogs.com/home <https://www.mindthegapdialogs.com/home>

On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 8:27 PM Joseph Holsten <joseph@josephholsten.com>
wrote:

> On Wed, Jan 18, 2023, at 17:17, Marc Donner wrote:
>
> I won't bore you with all of the details, but it was a struggle.
>
>
> Clearly, you mistake your audience. I would probably read a multi-volume
> series of these struggles.
>

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