From: cmetz@thor.tjhsst.edu (Craig Metz)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.aix
Subject: (none)
Date: 4 Oct 1992 13:13:45 -0500
Organization: UTexas Mail-to-News Gateway
NNTP-Posting-Host: cs.utexas.edu


	First things first: Updates

	My site has four PS/2s running PS/2 AIX 1.2 and
one RS/6000 running RS/6000 AIX 3.1.5. The PS/2s were
delivered spring of last year, and the RS/6000 was
delivered the last week of January this year. We have
has *no end of troubles* with both of these AIXes and
many of the problems are fixed in the newer versions of
the operating systems. The problem is that these 
machines and OS software were donated to us from IBM as
part of the SuperQuest program, and the invoices all
have Cornell University's account number on them (they
are the sponsor of the program) - so though it's our
equipment, as far as the people in IBM care, it belongs
to Cornell because their number was on the invoice. 
They have a local IBM rep, but both he and the people
from the department running the program have steadfastly
refused to reply to any of my requests for information
about how and how much $$ we could get updates to these
operating systems. So to make a long story short:

	1. How does IBM usually handle such updates?
		(*Can* we get an update?) 
	2. Through whom (what phone ## or whatever)
		would this need to be done?
	3. How much $$ would getting these updates
		cost? (We're not rich by any means)

	Next thing: IBM Xstation 130s

	Is there anywhere out there an X11R5 server
bootfile for these guys yet? When we got our RS/6000,
just as had been done with the PS/2 AIX machines, we
totally nuked the whole AIXwindows systems and build
a pure MIT X system. This causes problems on our
Xstations because they want snf format fonts and some
other R4-specific things, while the console and clients
are R5, and we're moving the PS/2s from R4 to R5 RSN.
So needless to say, if we could get the stations to R5,
life would be much happier.

	On the same note, we are using R5 xdm to handle
logins on the Xstations, but when they boot, they seem
to get some really messed up color maps and key maps -
for instance, Shift-2 = Escape (this is not from 
xmodmap, btw). Very odd behavior indeed - can anybody
point me to where I might find this kind of configuration
(I don't see anything in the /usr/lpp/X11 that would 
cause this - but we did really core-out that directory). 

	Third, this is if we can't get a software 
update, is there any way to get the AIXwindows libraries'
(the ones that came late last year - I don't know the
version, but it's R4) libXm.a to work with the normal
MIT libXt.a? It uses some special symbols that are very
obviously OEM add-ins, and so we have to link all Motif
programs with the R4 IBM libraries. 

	Finally: Talk (AIX 3.1.5)

	I'm most likely going to really flame IBM's
service people on this one, because since we got our
machine, talk and talkd have been a nightmare. You
try to talk to somebody, it gets to "[Checking for 
invitation on caller's machine]" and hangs. Kill it,
do a ps -ef | grep talk, and there's usually like
ten or twenty copies of talkd hanging around. There are
graceful solutions, but the usual way to handle it is
to just logout. This may be related to the fact that
the utmp entries (used by who) are only a rough estimate
of who is on the system. Now that we use Xdm and Xterms
with LoginShell: TRUE it's much better, but still we do
have problems with this. Any ideas would be appreciated.

	Sorry to flame so much about AIX, but though 
the IBM RS/6000 hardware is some of the best I've seen,
IBM AIX is just a pain to use sometimes. It mirrors
data in super-secret databases you can't find and will
periodically change back configuration changes it doesn't
like, and you can't core out the broken parts of the 
system (like many/most of the networking daemons) and
replace them with "standard" versions. It's almost to the
point of being reminiscent of SunOS...

					-Craig