From: dylan@ibmpcug.co.uk (Matthew Farwell)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.dec,comp.windows.x,comp.unix.xenix.sco,comp.unix.sysv386,comp.windows.misc,comp.unix.msdos,comp.unix.admin,comp.os.misc,comp.unix.questions,comp.sys.hp
Subject: Re: Question for net.views column in UNIX Today!
Date: 7 Apr 92 12:31:07 GMT
Organization: The IBM PC User Group, UK.

In article <1992Apr3.190000.23149@jato.jpl.nasa.gov> vsnyder@math.jpl.nasa.gov (Van Snyder) writes:
>In article <id.QTJO.41A@ferranti.com> peter@ferranti.com (Peter da Silva) writes:
>>In article <1992Apr2.021133.19228@riacs.edu> lamaster@viking.arc.nasa.gov (Hugh LaMaster -- RCS) writes:
>>> This seems to me to be mixing apples and oranges.  Every version of Unix that
>>> I have worked with over the last few years was stable when asked to do the
>>> kinds of things which standalone PCs and Macs do.  And most, in fact, were
>>> stable doing almost anything.
>>And if they cost about the same as the PCs and Macs, and if you could get
>>application software for them at Babbages that was as cheap and as good as
>>the stuff you can get for the PCs and Macs, then they'd totally flatten them
>>in the marketplace.
>Sure, my PC crashes more frequently than my Unix box, but when it does, it
>only takes 15 seconds to reboot, not 15 minutes.  I'm willing to put up with
>that to have a REALLY GOOD editor (brief or sage or ...) that I can afford
>($250 or less), 

You can get clones of brief for Unix.  Try Crisp.

>                a REALLY GOOD word processor (WordPerfect 5.1 or Word or ...)
>that I can afford (~$500), 

Umm, Word for Unix isn't that good - its a terrible memory hog.  Anyone
written a Word emulator for emacs?  :-)

>                           a REALLY GOOD Fortran development system with a
>REALLY FAST compiler and REALLY GOOD debugger that knows Fortran, not just C
>(Lahey),

I don't know how good GNU Fortran will be..., but gcc is rapidly
becoming standard...

>>>As far as applications software, there seems to be a wealth, an abundance, of
>>>Unix software now, and in fact, a lot of it has X interfaces - spreadsheets,
>>>project management, configuration management and control, publishing, pretty
>>>much you-name-it.
>>
>>OK, you have $2000. Go buy a UNIX box, hardware, software, applications, and
>>a 24-pin printer.
>
>The problem with Unix applications is that those one can afford are really
>sleazy (e.g. vi -- one level undo? edit one file at a time? modeful interface?
>get real!) or really sloppy (e.g. emacs takes 37 MB of disk space, brief fits
>in one MB), while the good ones are really expensive (compare Frame or
>Interleaf or Island Write or Unix WordPerfect to Wordperfect or Word on a PC).

WordPerfect & Word are Word Processors. Vi and, occasionally emacs, are
editors. Please compare apples with apples.  I've already mentioned
crisp for unix, theres also Microemacs, which takes up all of 92k on my
machine.  There is a definate lack of word processors for Unix, I admit.

>>> Everyone agrees that a standalone Unix system is harder to administer than a
>>> standalone Mac or PC.
>>Well, mainly, when it breaks it breaks in less obvious ways. I'll agree that
>>the network situation is exactly the opposite: UNIX tends to let you know
>>what went wrong less ambiguously.
>Maybe when YOUR workstation breaks some network related thing your Unix
>tells you more obviously what is going on.  I recently had just the
>opposite experience:  (1)  The sendmail.cf that was delivered with our
>system carefully stripped off the internet domain name.  (2) since it
>was sendmail.cf, which is the only thing I've ever seen that's worse than
>OS\360 JCL, I just got one from a colleague, and it seemed to work.  One
>doesn't look inside of sendmail.cf unless absolutely necessary, and one
>has almost no hope of changing it in such a way as to improve it.

There are other systems apart from sendmail.  MMDF has very easy to
understand tables.  You can get preprocessors for sendmail.cf files
(EASE).

>(3) A gateway two hops away broke.  (4) Nothing in my system told me that
>gateway was broken, since there was another gateway that gave me access
>to the same places.

And DOS/Novell/Windows has some magic way of telling you that a remote
sites have failed.  I'm impressed.  Does this mean if I install some DOS
mail software, then I'll get reports from UUNET when they go wrong?
Networking isn't just mail - I suspect that Peter was refering to local
LAN configuration, not mail, although mail under systems other than dos
seems to be easier to debug...

>                     (5) After a while (four weeks), I concluded that
>outgoing mail was disappearing down a black hole, even though mail was
>still arriving.  (6) After another two weeks I discovered that outgoing
>mail was being sent to the broken gateway no matter what the address --
>I stumbled onto /usr/spool/mqueue/syslog -- Isn't that an obvious place
>to look?  After all, that's where all the other log files for all the
>other tools go, right?

Well, looking in my manual (remember them?), it tells you to go and
looks at syslog(3).  So its not sendmail's fault at all, because
syslog() writes to a file specified in syslog.conf.  Its your
configuration thats at fault, not sendmail.

Misconfiguration of mail sites is a software independent problem,
especially large networks like the Internet.

>                        (7) After that, it was only a day's work to
>discover that the node my mail was being sent to was broken (ping +
>lots of phone calls), and eventually discover that it was mentioned
>in sendmail.cf as "DAfoo.bar" with nearby comments that "this is your
>internet mail relay..." with nothing nearby or in "man sendmail" that
>gives you a clue that that's the ONLY place your mail gets sent, even if
>it's on the same subnet you're on!
>
>I posted questions on the internet, and didn't get even one suggestion --
>apparently, nobody knew even where to start.  (The only way I was able
>to post was to log in to another machine).

Why does having sendmail out of action stop you from posting to usenet?

>I don't have anything on my PC's except telnet, rlogin, ftp and nfs,
>so I don't know whether network related problems are bigger on PC's
>or smaller, but the above experience convinced me that Unix network
>problems can get arbitrarily bad.

All network problems can get arbitrarily bad.  When you have a LAN of 20
PC's, you get a different order of problems than when you have a network
of 7.5 million.

Dylan.
-- 
'If there is a hung parliament, and John Major and Neil Kinnock have
both been hung, then I am willing to take over.  Vote Insanity - you
know it makes sense' - Screaming Lord Sutch
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