From: Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com>
To: Adam Thornton <athornton@gmail.com>
Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society <tuhs@tuhs.org>
Subject: Re: [TUHS] A/UX [was Linux is on-topic]
Date: Thu, 13 Aug 2020 13:28:34 -0600 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <CANCZdfo5QJKdoqss31Vo6BF2LuMSicje29oK922sFAeNAV9CjA@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAP2nic2Yd5ggdJfjDVGn-49_9ePmX8EEiQ2dp8zFAiPuMSKvKg@mail.gmail.com>
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On Thu, Aug 13, 2020, 1:19 PM Adam Thornton <athornton@gmail.com> wrote:
> Early AIX is what happens when you give a detailed description of Unix to
> mainframers who've never seen Unix, and then tell them to implement that
> system, and then ship it, without at any point letting someone who's used
> an actual Unix system touch it.
>
Ha.
Is there a good source of detailed technical info on early AIX systems?
Like early 80s versions?
Warner
> Adam
>
> On Thu, Aug 13, 2020 at 10:16 AM Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Fri, Jul 31, 2020 at 9:37 PM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
>>
>>> On Fri, Jul 31, 2020 at 07:12:57PM -0400, Richard Salz wrote:
>>> > > SMIT was quite nice
>>> >
>>> > i have never seen those four words together like that before.
>>>
>>> Me neither. SMIT was HORRIBLE if you understood the files in /etc and
>>> knew what to do with them.
>>
>>
>> The sysadmin in the CS department had a USENIX button on his wall: "SMIT
>> happens." I always found that amusing.
>>
>> The Motif-version was especially horrible, and crashed all the time. The
>> curses-based version was called `smitty`, which I found humorous in a way I
>> wouldn't have expected coming from "This page intentionally left blank"
>> IBM. In my mind, the worst part of admining RS/6000 boxes of that era was
>> the little 3-digit LED code on the front: I guess those machines didn't
>> assume that they had either a graphical head or a serial port, so this damn
>> teeny tiny display would cycle through a sequence of codes that told you
>> what the machine was doing; it came with a book that told you what each
>> code meant. Something like "387" meant mounting /usr. Ugh; I just found a
>> page on ibm.com describing these "IPL codes."
>>
>> It might be nice if you had no understanding
>>> of how to admin a Unix system and here is this "nice" curses based way
>>> to do admin.
>>>
>>
>> The thing was that IBM changed a lot of stuff almost gratuitously.
>> Specifics I remember were the print daemon (I ported `lpd` from 4.4BSD for
>> that) and anything related to disks and filesystems. In fairness, they had
>> logical volumes that could split across disks before most other Unix
>> systems that I was working on at the time, but the commands were all custom
>> to AIX and, frankly, weird: I remember that one would "vary on" a logical
>> volume before one could mount a filesystem from it or something like that.
>> I was told at the time that the people who'd built that side of things had
>> come from the mainframe world, where that was the nomenclature. Creating
>> JFS filesystems required these tools as well; there was new `newfs_jfs` as
>> I recall. So I ended up using SMIT for basically anything related to
>> filesystems, but for almost nothing else.
>>
>> To anyone remotely competent, and I don't mean edit sendmail.cf, I mean
>>> you can edit inetd.conf, you can edit a crontab file, etc, SMIT was a
>>> nightmare that made something that should be vi $FILE, done 20 seconds
>>> later, a hellish journey through their menus. It was AWFUL.
>>>
>>
>> One of the more gratuitous differences I remember from AIX was that
>> instead of having e.g. /etc/shadow, they had /etc/password (all spelled
>> out), which had semi-structured stanzas for each user. That was just weird.
>> Fortunately, we were using NIS and it was smart enough to ignore that for
>> NIS users.
>>
>> Ask me how I know.
>>>
>>
>> I still have nightmares about AIX.
>>
>> - Dan C.
>>
>>
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next prev parent reply other threads:[~2020-08-13 19:29 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 106+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2020-07-17 18:08 [TUHS] H.J. Lu Bootable Root & Base System disks Norman Wilson
2020-07-17 18:14 ` John Cowan
2020-07-17 18:19 ` Larry McVoy
2020-07-17 19:53 ` [TUHS] Linux is on-topic Warren Toomey
2020-07-17 19:57 ` Larry McVoy
2020-07-17 20:00 ` Adam Thornton
2020-07-17 20:04 ` Larry McVoy
2020-07-17 20:03 ` Dan Cross
2020-07-17 23:31 ` A. P. Garcia
2020-07-19 10:26 ` emanuel stiebler
2020-07-17 20:07 ` Warren Toomey
2020-07-17 20:12 ` Warner Losh
2020-07-17 20:19 ` Clem Cole
2020-07-19 9:54 ` Sergio Pedraja
2020-07-17 20:08 ` Michael Kjörling
2020-07-17 20:55 ` Grant Taylor via TUHS
2020-07-17 21:28 ` Michael Kjörling
2020-07-18 20:22 ` Ed Carp
2020-07-18 20:29 ` Warner Losh
2020-07-19 2:31 ` Gregg Levine
2020-07-19 3:46 ` Wesley Parish
2020-07-19 4:42 ` Grant Taylor via TUHS
2020-07-19 18:01 ` Michael Parson
2020-07-20 8:47 ` [TUHS] A/UX [was Linux is on-topic] arnold
2020-07-20 9:46 ` Arno Griffioen
2020-07-20 16:35 ` Arthur Krewat
2020-07-20 17:44 ` Arno Griffioen
2020-07-20 19:07 ` Rich Morin
2020-07-20 19:45 ` Al Kossow
2020-07-20 19:49 ` Al Kossow
2020-07-24 0:01 ` Chris Hanson
2020-07-20 20:20 ` Ed Carp
2020-07-20 21:02 ` John Cowan
2020-07-20 22:27 ` Ed Carp
2020-07-24 0:04 ` Chris Hanson
2020-07-31 23:02 ` Dave Horsfall
2020-07-31 23:12 ` Richard Salz
2020-08-01 1:36 ` Larry McVoy
2020-08-01 16:08 ` Nemo Nusquam
2020-08-01 17:01 ` Arthur Krewat
2020-08-13 0:00 ` Dave Horsfall
2020-08-13 1:47 ` Larry McVoy
2020-08-13 3:15 ` Grant Taylor via TUHS
2020-08-13 4:02 ` Larry Cashdollar via TUHS
2020-08-31 21:12 ` Dave Horsfall
2020-09-03 14:10 ` Michael Parson
2020-08-13 1:53 ` Nemo Nusquam
2020-08-13 17:14 ` Dan Cross
2020-08-13 17:19 ` Henry Bent
2020-08-13 17:58 ` Warner Losh
2020-08-13 20:04 ` John Cowan
2020-08-13 20:52 ` Dan Cross
2020-08-14 17:31 ` Paul Winalski
2020-08-15 1:24 ` Dave Horsfall
2020-08-18 13:57 ` Derek Fawcus
2020-08-18 14:11 ` John Cowan
2020-08-31 21:20 ` Dave Horsfall
2020-08-13 19:18 ` Adam Thornton
2020-08-13 19:28 ` Warner Losh [this message]
2020-08-13 20:15 ` [TUHS] AIX link repost [was " Charles H Sauer
2020-08-13 20:09 ` [TUHS] " Rich
2020-08-13 20:16 ` Larry McVoy
2020-08-13 20:17 ` Dr Iain Maoileoin
2020-08-14 1:04 ` Christopher Browne
2020-08-14 17:18 ` Jim Capp
2020-08-14 17:37 ` Jim Capp
2020-08-14 17:39 ` Jon Steinhart
2020-08-15 0:33 ` Rich
2020-08-15 1:20 ` Larry McVoy
2020-08-15 2:08 ` Dave Horsfall
2020-08-15 2:47 ` Warner Losh
2020-08-15 17:44 ` Paul Winalski
2020-08-15 12:05 ` Thomas Paulsen
2020-08-15 1:33 ` Jon Steinhart
2020-08-15 2:02 ` Dave Horsfall
2020-08-15 2:45 ` Andrew Hume
2020-08-15 16:55 ` William Cheswick
2020-08-15 3:29 ` Larry McVoy
2020-08-15 1:40 ` Gregg Levine
2020-08-13 22:24 ` Grant Taylor via TUHS
2020-07-24 0:02 ` Chris Hanson
2020-07-20 9:48 ` Andrew Warkentin
2020-07-20 11:49 ` Larry McVoy
2020-07-20 14:36 ` Clem Cole
2020-07-20 17:24 ` John Cowan
2020-07-20 22:11 ` Ed Carp
2020-07-21 1:04 ` Larry McVoy
2020-07-22 3:13 ` tytso
2020-07-22 5:40 ` Bakul Shah
2020-07-22 14:16 ` Larry McVoy
2020-07-20 12:32 ` Derrik Walker v2.0
2020-07-20 12:54 ` Andrew Warkentin
2020-07-21 1:50 ` Larry McVoy
2020-07-21 2:30 ` Gregg Levine
2020-07-22 3:44 ` Jason
2020-07-22 12:23 ` Derrik Walker v2.0
2020-07-20 14:28 ` Clem Cole
2020-07-22 3:50 ` Jason
2020-07-22 4:26 ` Henry Bent
2020-07-24 0:10 ` Chris Hanson
2020-07-20 0:24 ` [TUHS] Linux is on-topic Ed Carp
2020-07-22 3:41 ` Jason
2020-07-22 16:15 ` Michael Parson
2020-07-18 3:34 ` Tomasz Rola
2020-07-18 16:45 ` Christopher Browne
2020-07-19 7:32 ` Lars Brinkhoff
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