From: cpcahil@vti.com (Conor P. Cahill)
Subject: Re: What's happening to ISC UNIX?
Organization: Virtual Technologies Inc.
Date: Sun, 22 Nov 1992 14:43:32 GMT

todd@toolz.uucp (Todd Merriman) writes:

>sp_pm@space.alcbel.be (Paul Moore) writes:
>>I bought ISC-2.2 about 2 years ago. Have they improved on it since? 

>They have fixed a few bugs, but little else has changed in the
>basic Unix O/S and the Software Development Set.  I can't speak
>to the  X-Windows implementation as I don't run X-Windows.  

Mostly what has been done over the past few years has been support 
for more hardware, performance improvements, and bug fixes.  The SVR3.2
baseline is very stable and very fast.  (SVR4, on the other hand, even
with the BSD file system, doesn't come near to ISC on the same hardware)

Improvements include (and this is all off the top of my head, so I may
get something wrong):

	* support for EISA systems with > 16MB memory
	* support for EISA controllers (Bustek, Adaptec)
	* much more stable TCP/IP
	* support for newer NFS (later release)
	* support for more graphics cards 
	* support for X11R4 and a much faster server
	* support for more scsi devices
	* easier (subjective) configuration (and I am one of those people
	  who still change kernel parameters by hand, but I have to admit
	  that the new configuration mechanism is much easier to use if 
	  you don't know what you are doing)
	* support for dos partitions > 32MB
	* faster mounting of FFS partitions
	* on-line manual pages
	* lots of bug fixes 

As far as robustness, we have the entire workstation developer system loaded
on our server with 48MB memory, 3.4 GB of disk, 5.0GB 8mm, 2.0GB 4mm DAT,
24 serial ports.  Until we configured one of our other systems with SVR4,
our systems had been up for three to four months at a time (and we only 
took them down when we were adding hardware, or had to load new drivers).

At this time, we seem to had some incompatibility between DELL SVR4 and
ISC UNIX that causes ISC's network to go down about once a month.  We haven't
been able to reproduce the circumstances that caused the problem, so it
hasn't been reported as a bug as of yet.

I guess you could say that we are very satisfied with ISC UNIX.

>3.0 is the latest version.  The takeover by SunSoft has confused

3.01 is the latest version.

>in the past two years, except for the system administration
>(which features color menus that take *forever* to execute).  

>>Is ISC up to SVr4 yet? 

>No.  And, there is no ksh.

I beleive 3.01 does have a ksh, but I am not positive.  As to SVR4, I 
would tend to think that it will need at least another year or two before
it reaches the same level of robustness as is present in the ISC UNIX
product.

>>Has VP/ix been improved to provide Windows 3.0/3.1 support?

>The documentation states that Windows can be run in real-mode,
>but I found that the Windows 3.1 install program crashes VPIX
>immediately.  VPIX performance has decreased noticably since 2.2.   

From what I understand, VP/ix will work with Windows 3.0 in real-mode and
Windows 3.1 is not supposed to support real-mode any longer, so I can
understand why you would have a problem loading 3.1.



>I was so disatisfied with my upgrade to ISC 3.0 that I asked
>SunSoft for my money back, and I explained to them in writing
>why I thought it was a shoddy product.  I added TCP/IP and NFS
>when I upgraded:  it took 4 phone calls to ISC support to get
>Unix working, and 6 phone calls and a FAX to get TCP/IP and NFS
>working.  But, my initial 30-day support period ran out before I
>could get everything working!  I have installed SCO Unix, AIX,
>AT&T Unix, VMS; so it wasn't as if I had no experience doing
>installations. 

We have installed ISC 2.2, 2.2.1, and 3.0 on a slew of systems and have
yet to place a call to ISC for installation support.  Perhaps a better 
contribution to the net would be a discussion of the contents of those
calls.  If you had real problems that weren't caused by failure to read
the manuals, then others will be able to benefit from your experiences.


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Conor P. Cahill              (703)430-9247            cpcahil@virtech.vti.com
Virtual Technologies, Inc.  46030 Manekin Plaza          Dulles, VA 20166 
Newsgroups: comp.unix.sysv386