From: pcb@gunfight.austin.ibm.com (Peter C. Bahrs)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.aix
Subject: Re: (none)
Date: 6 Oct 92 16:45:51 GMT
Organization: *IX Open Systems, IBM Boca Raton

In article <9210041811.AA13904@thor.tjhsst.edu> cmetz@thor.tjhsst.edu (Craig Metz) writes:
>
>	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
I don't know if my email got through but you can get AIX 1.3 upgrade
for free, however, only for the person who "owns" the license.
Maybe they can give you the license?
>
>	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
>
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