On Wed, 3 Jul 1996 23:24:34 -0400 James B. Byrne said:
>I thought that some of you might like to see some of the problems that plague
>Unix users.  The gentleman who writes the following is looking for some batch
>control software but I thought that his motivations might prove of more
>interest to this list's membership.  This comes from the HP-UX list.
 
[...snip...]
 
Let me relate a "first-hand" story which may help explain my Posix activism
in recent years.  I don't like Unix, but it is a necessary co-existance we
must achieve, as hopefully this will explain.
 
The university thrives on "freeware" but has the advantage that some things
businesses pay for we get free or sharply discounted.  We're in the middle
of completing campus network cabling and the typical "installation" involves
setting up an interface card and installing a "network suite" not unlike you
might get from some service providers (Trumpet Winsock, Netscape, Eudora,
WinVN, FTP client, EWAN and QWS3270 telnet, etc).  This gets you to anything
on campus and the outside world except a 3000 - that's a pricey HP terminal
emulator (Reflection or whatever).  Justifying costs doesn't go over well
when the rest of the world doesn't work like the 3000.
 
Gopher was first on campus, then www.  The 3000 was left out until the NCSA
port of httpd.  We had HPDesk for years, but no SMTP until 3K's Desklink.
We bought FTP (another difficult to justify expense) for MPE 4.0
 
The 5.0 release (plus DeskLink and httpd) fixed some of that, but it goes
further and runs deeper.
 
Our library runs a 3000-based 3rd party catalog/circulation system.  This
system is "porting" to a Unix/Oracle platform.  The first step is a forms
based CGI web interface to the 3000's package using telnet sessions as
the link to the 3000.  The cgi scripts are perl5, we only had perl4 at the
time.  We tested the gateway using a Sun and it's NCSA 1.5 server and it is
beautiful (to the end-user).  The current perl5 won't quite run the scripts
yet, so the library acquired a small Sun for this purpose (one of those
pre-loaded Netscape server things) since "they can't wait".  But wait...
 
The Sun came in last week.  They're still trying to bring it up.  I have
fielded several calls from the library "computer guy" for help, and we've
resorted to our resident Sun guru.  We tried uploading the Reflection file
transfer program, only to discover there's no C compiler there.  We ftp the
object file over from the big Sun, still no dice (wrong permissions, fixed).
Then he asks about the server and it's handling of cgi things, saying that
"it runs cgi from anywhere" (this thing uses Netscape like HP-UX uses SAM
for system management).  Ooops.  Globally enabled cgi scripts.  I informed
him of the dangers of running cgi scripts with the server running as root.
He's cursed the thing since it came in, and our Sun guy has cursed it and
at last report was still uploading Gnu stuff to get it halfway civilized.
 
Maybe this is "status quo" for Unix management, but it certainly opened
some eyes for us.  Not to mention no backup, no spooler, etc.  And to more
or less quote his comments as best I recall, "I thought Windows was quirky,
but the window-like interface on this thing sucks".  OK, I can excuse that
to inexperience, but the bottom line is pretty clear.  Throw an HP3000 user
into the Unix environment and it's the Twilight Zone.  "Well, cc isn't there
so you need to mkdir /usr/local/bin, ftp unxlink2 there, and chmod 711; then
get perl5.002.tar.gz, gunzip perl5.002.tar, and tar -xvf perl5.002.tar.  Now
you can Configure, make, and installperl.  Oh wait, you don't have gunzip?
Well, you need to..."
 
The same issues apply to Posix, but you can >exit back to civilization :-)
 
Bottom line - a Sun box was purchased because we're behind in the porting
race.  I don't like it, he doesn't like it, nobody here likes it, but it has
happened since there was NO other alternative.  And this is a "tangent" case,
not a mainstream application.  I don't want to lose the 3000 on a "tangent".
It makes no business sense in the long term, no reasonable sense in any
terms, and serves as a perfect example of why we're losing out.
 
Jeff Kell <[log in to unmask]>
 
PS - The new address (I try to post it) will work regardless.  utcvm will be
     going away soon and the list will be moving to an NT box, unless I can
     get the mail interface of listserv to work on a 3000 (listserv itself
     compiled and executes quite nicely, thank you; just missing yet another
     hook in mail to make it fly).