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How Hard is it to Manage Different Unices?
vrmlguy asks: "Where I work has several Unix-based servers, all running the same vendor's OS. We are getting ready to buy another big server, and management wants to get bids from other vendors. However, our staff is only familar with our current vendor's OS. Yes, I know that any two flavors of Unix are more alike than not, and yes, I know about the Rosetta Stone for Unix that makes it easy to transfer skills. I want to know about the down-side: What's the difference in the cost of operations between a mono-culture and a shop running two or more vendors' OSs?"
my company runs almost 10 different flavors of UNIX for production purposes. since i'm the only UNIX admin here, keeping the machines update is quite a task. most of the machines are on a private net, so i don't have to worry about patches that often, but when it comes time to fix a bad harddrive or broken ethernet card, i wish that i could just repeat what i did on the last machine.
also they might seem the same, every UNIX flavor has it's differences. any time something goes wrong, you have to deal with 10 different salesmen from 10 differnt vendors.
good luck.
I'm going to try and not sound like a troll here. But this Ask Slashdot question seems complete rubbish.
Coukd the Slashdot folks be a little more discriminating in their choice of questions, please? The most entertaining/thought-provoking parts of this story, seem to be the idiot troll posts. This is hardly a thought-provoking or difficult question to answer/figure out with the most miniscule of job skill.
To answer this silly question:
The difference is: a lot, due to training/familiarization, support contracts, possible hardware differences, etc. DUH.
You can mod me down if you want.
And you can tell me that the real Unix Power is in the Command Line and in VI (or Emacs).
But today, if you give good training to your staff and give them good management tool, like the Tivoli suite from IBM and the Unicenter from CA, and I know you can name it a dozen of this Multi-Unix management center.
With this kind of tool, you can realy incress the number of Unix Boxes managed by one Unix Admin!
-- Do you really want to fly in a plane designed by one who never pilot ?
Ceci n'est pas une Signature !
One major consideration will be the service contract with the vendors. With 2 vendors, you'll buy 2 service contracts. You can have all the best sys admins you want, but I'm sure you'll need at least a minimal service contract for a commercial Unix. Can adding a second contract add a lot to overall cost? Hard to say without any details of the company, but I'd guess adding a basic service contract from the new vendor will significantly add to TCO.
Developers: We can use your help.
For example, on Solaris (without Veritas Volume Manager), you have to "carve out" your disk filesystem by filesystem, and work with devices in /dev/dsk/cAtBdCsD format. On AIX, the concept is totally different with Logical Volume Manager, wherein filesystems can be created on the fly. But HP-UX uses both in an odd fashion, forsaking slices and using a "castrated" form of LVM. This is just one example, as you will find other things in HP-UX such as the useradd command being identical to Linux and Solaris, and the SAM tool being very close to AIX's SMIT utility.
In the end, as you will find, there is no uber-Unix that will carry over to all of the other flavors. IMHO, HP-UX is as close as you will get. But, my personal preference of all Unices is AIX due to its ease of use (an IBM tool easy to use? I know it sounds like an oxymoron) and robust capabilities, combined with Linux integration in the most recent versions. Flame as you will, I'm interested in hearing anybody else's insight.
--Chag
Most companies I have worked at or know people at go with a third party backup solution such as the ones from Tivoli or Veritas.
We have looked at both TSM and NetBackup. Both are an improvement over my current Solaris backup and restore process, but neither are as nice as what AIX does out of the box.
It was an interesting experience talking to the vendors: the Veritas guys claimed their product was better than TSM, and gave use four or five reasons why. The IBM people claimed that their product was better than Veritas for the exact same reasons. Both products are pretty good, and each has strengths and weaknesses.
AIX has it's faults but +5 insightful to IBM for mksysb.
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
Here is a Google cache of the link he mentioned
http://www-ccar.colorado.edu/~jasp2/Graph.html http://cam.radioactivecat.com/unix-rosetta.pdf Not as graphically friendly as the orginal... But, Still gets the point across...
1) You can install the same shell on just about all UNIX's. Most people where I am prefer tcsh as it has some nice features.
2) You can standardize on scripts, either use csh (blah) or sh. We prefer sh as it is found on just about EVERY unix (Sun, HP, AIX, BSD's, Linux).
3) Avoid vender extensions to the basic shell. HP has done some aweful things there in its bourne shell and they are not compatible with Sun and in some cases Linux either. I.E. Always use `cat foo` and not $(cat foo) in sh scripts. There are other things like that.
There are problems in supporting more than one UNIX, but there are also workarounds if you do it right.
Only 'flamers' flame!
I've rarely seen mono-unix environments. What is more common these days seems to be a combination of an open-source unix and a commercial unix.
open source operating systems such as Linux or FreeBSD for handeling things such as web serving, MRTG, to take advantage of cheap hardware, and a commerical OS such as Solaris or AIX to handle the tasks that can't be handled by an open source solutions, such as Oracle or something hardcore that requires a big and bad machine.
In these cases, it's quite easy to run two unixes. It really depends on what you need it for.
As far as problems go, the only real problem you have is getting used to the new environment. My company is running HP-UX 11, AIX and RedHat Linux. HP-UX is a dream to configure and when I have to work on AIX, I have to most of the time, take the back roads through the console. It can be a pain but it's just like any new system. You just have to learn it. Oh, and sometimes root on HP-UX != root on AIX... but we're working on it.
Going from SuSE to LFS wasn't as bad as you might think. The main difference that I can recall is that the scripts that control various services live in /sbin/init.d on a SuSE box, but /etc/init.d on an LFS box.
The biggest difficulty is dealing with the automated config software that most distros use. I can usually set up most things on a SuSE box through YaST, but I haven't figured out whatever config utilities are used by the one Redh*t box at work that I haven't nuked yet. (Then again, I ran SuSE at home for a couple of years. I ran Slackware before that, and SLS before that. I've never installed Redh*t or had to deal with it prior to my current job.) I'd still rather tweak the different config files manually for the few apps that need adjustment, though; it's usually easier to dial in the exact setup you want that way. That's why most of the Linux machines I control run LFS now (the only exceptions are the aforementioned Redh*t box and an ancient 486 print server that was set up with Slackware because I didn't want to wait for that slug to build LFS).
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
As a senior systems engineer from a similar organization (Carrier1 (FALCO!)) I can say there were no issue running a multi unix environment, and I've never had any issue with it at any of my previous companies (nor have any of the engineers I've worked with).
:). I had Mac OS X, GNU/HURD, Debian and Solaris all on my desk at one point.
:)
At Carrier1 had FreeBSD, Red Hat & Debian Linux, Solaris 9 & 9, HP-UX, even GNU/Hurd and Mac OS X (well, on *my* system
The only problem I've ever had is the fairly trivial (?!) one of getting the command flags right - stuff like the 'ps','route','ipchains, 'ipfw' and 'ifconfig' commands syntax being different, the different flags for package management tools, that sort of thing.
I quickly came to realise that it's not possible to remember all the flags for all programs and remember the best way to do something on a particular system if you are busy all the time, things just seem to seep out. This happens if you are spending lots of time programming or in meetings or working on large projects - in which case you might not touch one type of system for months (until there is a problem with it), at which point you find your self quickly reading man pages and referring to Google a lot. All you need to do is remeber what's improrant, especially things you'll need for troubleshooting, and not worry about the rest - it's enough to know about tool's like Solaris 'ndd' and Linux's 'mknod' and what they do, if you need to remeber exactly how to use them in a given instance you can refer to man pages, O'Reilly Books or Google (which I often find the fastest).
Staying current, reading Freshmeat everyday, installing and configuring new Unixes and new & un-familer packages regularly, being on mailing lists and reading Slashdot are good ways to stay up to date - the more you know the less likely you are to run into something completely unexpected. If your resourceful (which you should be as a Systems Engineer) the only real problems arise went you don't even know where to start, everything else is a piece of cake.
Basically, if you really know unix (and are not just a Red Hat Linux or Solaris flunky who has convinced themselves they are Gurus while they still run Windows 2000 day to day) then you won't have any problems.
Oh, and making lame excuses like 'well I need Windows for work stuff' and 'they won't let me run Unix on my desktop' DO NOT wash - they are just that - excuses for lameness.
I have been for job interviews and been introduced to guys who called themselves (literally!) 'Unix Gods', yet they had only ever used Solaris - if you have any of those you are in deep shit right now. [ Needless to say I ran a mile! ]
Most people fall somewhere in the middle of those two, you'll probably only have one or two decent guys, if your lucky, though if you need to ask you are very possibly in trouble already!
YMMV.