On Thu, Aug 13, 2020, 1:19 PM Adam Thornton 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 wrote: > >> On Fri, Jul 31, 2020 at 9:37 PM Larry McVoy 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. >> >>