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Sun Chief Calls Out IBM, Demands Compatibility
downbad writes "Sun's President, Jonathan Schwartz, yesterday published an Open Letter to the CEO of IBM, Sam Palmisano, in which he alluded to "behavior reminiscent of an IBM history many CIOs would like to forget" - a reference to Sun's frustration that IBM isn't supporting Solaris 10 with WebSphere, DB2, Tivoli, Rational and MQSeries products. In his "Dear Sam" letter - circulated via his blog - Schwartz refers first to the "long history of partnering" between Sun and IBM, and claims Sun customers have made repeated calls to IBM about having the choice to run IBM products on Solaris 10." *cough* Kettle, meet Pot.
Most of the people who I know who tell me about the old time UNIX, tell me:
AIX was in general a real pain in the ass (this might have changed in the intervening 5-10 years since their experience). That it was even more different then Solaris was in terms of the arcane knowledge you needed to administer it properly.
I've known more then a few DBA's and SA's who have told me that at various points, it was easier to just run screaming from AIX then to deal with it. Eventually, most all of it could be overcome, but that learning all of it's pitfalls could be a very painful experience (After reviewing more then a few of the Oracle Bugs reports, I can see that it would terrify me to run Oracle on anything from the 4.[23] era). When given a choice, 9 times out of 10, everyone I've ever dealt with would rather run Solaris then AIX. Maybe it's because I work in a city where most everyone uses Solaris, so it's flaws are just well known pot holes every avoids out of habit.
I've heard horror stories about AIX, HP-UX (HP's UNIX), DNIX (Sequent's UNIX), IRIX (SGI's Unix), SCO, and OSF/1 (DEC's UNIX). Actually, I can't remember too many SCO administrative nightmares, but that might be that not too many people I know have ever dealt with UnixWare.
Most of them, I can't even recall, but I remember the AIX goop quite clearly, as it never sounded very UNIX'y to me.
In the end, I've always been told that doing anything not thru SMIT (I believe it was referred to as "smitty"), was a bad idea. That just hand editting files was a recipe for disaster in their experience. I thought they said that the files in /etc, got output for compatibility, but that there was a binary backend that was authoratitive, and could be accessed via a programitic API. All that sounded like a disaster waiting to happen. Now, I might have been informed incorrectly, or my knowledge might be years and years out of date.
Finally, I've found that shipping two sets of commands is a recipe for disaster when shell scripting. I'd much rather have one or other, but not both (a shell script run as one person won't work when another runs it on the same machine). In the end, it's a source of more problems then just learning the native tools. I never minded having too command sets (gmake, gcc, gawk), but having to figure out if make is IBM make, or GNU make always seemed silly to me.
Kirby