[PLUG] I wonder if I can find an opinion here...

[Lancashire, Pete]

hmm I'll toss my 30 yrs in :)

> AIX works, but it has limited and crufty tools.  You can get 
> packages from 
> IBM for most of the Linux tools, but they are from Redhat 7.x 
> and are not 
> current or patched regularly.  Not certain why anyone would 
> want to run 
> AIX unless they had an app that demanded it or special hardware needs.

I totally agree on this one. But one has to remember, today purchases
on this type of server are not usually made on technical merits, if any
technology is there, it is usually covered in so much gloss (as in glossies
a slang for marketing/advertising paper) that you need a chisel to
get to the dead tree material. IBM got to be IBM on their marketing and
sales skills,
and still do. They have tons of technology such as the pSeries but if you
look at the performance/cost matrix then add AIX, it is at my pc opinion
sad, AIX could have been something great. But knowing a couple (ex) IBM
engineering VP's, they constantly were under the eye of Armonk not to
steal sales form the X and I series, or for us old timers AS/400 and 390's.
They say the power-5 has so much going for it, such as the ability to
monitor internal registers, etc, but to get to see anything performance
wise you have to shell out $1000's and that is plural just to look.
Add that to get C, C++ and a dev environment will set you back about $4K.
There is only one third party OSS software source and it is getting really
bad, UCSD. Last time I had something that didn't work, their reply was
we just compile it, we don't use it. If IBM did not give them hardware
for basically free, my call is they would vanish as fast as Toronto did.
As to the hardware
to get a say 4 way server reasonable loaded say with 16 GB RAM, etc, will
set you back close to $60-100K, and that 4 way is not 4 CPU's, it is
a 4 Core CPU. Again, marketing. That $20K box they advertise is a scam
period.

> SCO has never been a good choice.  They have always been the most 
> expensive option out there for what you get.  Now that they have even 
> bigger lawyer bills than what they pay their developers, it 
> is even worse.

1000% agree, that's why you saw it so much in gov't locations,
their only technology was in the quality of the sales presentations,
and the type of cloth the suits were made out of. The best is IBM.


> HP-UX and I have never gotten along.  Less said the better.

Never used it, to me HP's fame was the ability to sell a complete
package, and the package worked. A good example is 1/2 of all
credit unions were HP, and it worked. Nothing to do with HPUX.


> Until recently Solaris has shipped old outdated versions of 
> tools, did 
> not ship with a C compiler and took forever for security 
> patches.  They 
> are getting better.  The Sun hardware allows some useful 
> remote debugging 
> possibilities I have heard.  Never had to use them.

Here's the one I will disagree on. They had good tools but
where expensive, and the UI for the tools were mostly command
line. On packages they unofficially support SFW (SunFreeWare),
think of a fedora repository but for Solaris. When I admin'd
a shop with Sun/Solaris I had no trouble getting
the latest FOSS from SFW. 
As with AIX, the C/C++ compiler was not free, but not like
AIX, gcc was available from SFW and it worked. Sun's C got
you more performance but not much more unless you were doing some
fancy SMP tricks. More the libraries then the compiler itself.
Check out Dtrace .. it is totally awesome. Their Fortran was
very good.
As to hardware, if your application can really make use of
SMP and more importantly fine grained threading, you cant
beat something like the 890, especially if it has 64 GB of RAM.
Not everything can be run on a 1,000 chickens (*).
I was part of a group in 1995 that tried to convince Sun to
open up Solaris, there were quite a few Sun insiders that wanted to.
And don't get me going about the lame decision to kill Solaris x86.
Sun is their own worst enemy, period.

> It really depends on the hardware you want to use, the level of 
> handholding you need from a vendor and the speed of security patches. 
> Linux provides all those these days. Not certain what the 
> support for the 
> BSDs are like anymore.  (OS X and BSDi are the only 
> commercial BSDs I have 
> used.)

BSD is still there and still as stable, bullet proof etc. If I was not
so lazy I would prob have the devil (FreeBSD) on my mail/web/etc servers.
or I would have Solaris x86. May just do it.

OSX why why a greatly hacked 4.2 not 4.4 ? If I had gone with Apple in
the *nix server world, I would have been burned big time. But we have
to go back to A/UX. Anyone remember the Apple servers ?

-pete back to work on that p550 with AIX 

(*) If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use:
    Two strong oxen or 1024 chickens? -Seymour Cray