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If you are or have been the sysadmin of a DG/UX AViiON system, particularly
one with a somewhat large number (60 or more) interactive users (particularly
using a large number of single-character-interrupt apps such as tcsh, pine,
vi etc.) I would be highly interested in hearing about your experiences with
the system.

The particular size of hardware we're interested in hearing about is the
AV5500 and friends, running (of course) DG/UX, with two or so CPU's.

I have seen a number of highly positive postings about these machines via
USENET, but at the time I saw them this issue had not been raised at our
site, and I didn't keep track of most of them.  I would be interested in
hearing more input on this subject if it is available.

Thanks in advance for any info on this.
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Quote:>If you are or have been the sysadmin of a DG/UX AViiON system, particularly
>one with a somewhat large number (60 or more) interactive users (particularly
>using a large number of single-character-interrupt apps such as tcsh, pine,
>vi etc.) I would be highly interested in hearing about your experiences with
>the system.

We're running two AViiONs.  They've performed well.  (pine, trn, gopher,
vi, telnet, ftp, lynx, gopherd, Oracle, FOCUS).  Send me private e-mail
if you want further details.  For the net:

The multiprocessing support is very nice and seems to scale well.  Multi-
piece logical disks are also nice.  A logical disk can span multiple
physical disks.  This is under DG/UX 5.4R2.  Under 5.4R3 there is supposed
to be an even nicer virtual disk mechanism, but we haven't installed
it yet.  Anybody in the know want to comment?

Dean, Administrative Services                     Phone:  1-803-833-8217
Presbyterian College       503 S. Broad St.      Clinton, SC  29325  USA

The virtual disk system seems a lot easier to manipulate, although I
had to learn the new program names. :-)  We have noticed that (at
least under DG/UX 5.4R3.MU02) it is quite easy for Ingres to bring the
machine to its knees.  Other bad points:  virtually impossible to tune
(unless you pay SEPAC the big bucks), easy to make bad configuration
choices, system info retrieved by the "standard" SVR4 calls is
misleading at best, sar/nsar seem to think that the machine uses 100%
of swap 100% of the time (no possible with our configuration).  Other
good points: tech support has been very helpful, POSIX compliance
helps while porting (just build the linux target for Mosaic/httpd),
sysadm util is quite nice once you get it figured out, gcc is the
default compiler.

=====================================================================
| It's nice to be important, but it's *important* to suck up to the |
| sysadmin  -- Me                                                   |
=====================================================================

: If you are or have been the sysadmin of a DG/UX AViiON system, particularly
: one with a somewhat large number (60 or more) interactive users (particularly
: using a large number of single-character-interrupt apps such as tcsh, pine,
: vi etc.) I would be highly interested in hearing about your experiences with
: the system.

: The particular size of hardware we're interested in hearing about is the
: AV5500 and friends, running (of course) DG/UX, with two or so CPU's.

I have similar questions about DGs. We are looking at an AV9500 dual
processor box.

I have not seen or worked on such a box.

I personally will be trying to push towards a Sun Sparc Server 2000
or 800/T500 HP.

I have seen the glossy on the DG and have the following concerns:

        1) Stability: How is DG doing? Do people expect them to be
                                around in 3-5 years supporting this
                                HW/SW? I worked at Solbourne and have
                                seen what can happen and how fast.

        2) Market Share and Apps: Has anyone found any SW or tools
                                that will NOT run on DG? Database
                                engines? Backup solutions (Legato, etc)?
                                Public domain SW? We would be running
                                Unidata initially but may of course
                                move to an Oracle/Sybase class engine.

        3) Hardware: Is the technology current/stable? Seeing the specs
                                I noticed that the 9500 is VME based!
                                I know that HW is readily available
                                for VME, etc. But I do not think
                                it stacks up well against newer bus
                                architectures that Sun/HP/DEC/IBM have.
                                I also saw that the CPUs are Motorola
                                88K based. I think I saw an article
                                this summer stating that Motorola
                                had stopped 88K development!

        4) Load: The current requirement for the machine would be
                                100+ Unidata users, mostly coming
                                in from Wyse terminals off terminal
                                servers. We need the box to really
                                scale to 1000+ users. Can the box
                                handle this sort of I/O?

Thank you very much for any response. We can't afford to make this
large of mistake.

Note that this is NOT for Visual Numerics, just using an account
here.

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