Hm, System V
.
Interesting... when did Netcom switch to System V? Did I miss an
announcement or something?
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<tsalagi> <@> <netcom.com>
Rick Snover
>On 13 Oct 1998 06:57:18 -0700, tsalagi@ . (|See .sig|) wrote:
>
>>
>>Interesting... when did Netcom switch to System V? Did I miss an
>>announcement or something?
>
It's one of the two major "flavors" of UNIX, the other being BSD
(originally from UC Berkeley). System V came out of AT&T Bell Labs, and
is becoming (has become?) the standard version in many (most?)
commercial UNIX distributions. Sun started installing System V by
default sometime after they started calling their system "Solaris"
instead of "SunOS" (though SunOS is still in there some where). HP has
defaulted to System V since at least HPUX 10.0.
The differences should be transparent to us ixers. There are some
significant differences down in the kernel in terms of multithreading
and other esoterica that should be largely transparent even to shell
users, but many of the shell commands do behave differently and/or take
different options (most notably off the top of my head, the ps command
is very different). A lot of software originally compiled on a BSD
system will probably need to be at least re-compiled (if not actually
modified) to run under System V.
Both the Sun and HP distros, and probably most others, do include the
all the BSD versions of the commands, usually stored in /usr/ucb. A
sheller who's used to the BSD versions of commands can get them back by
placing /usr/ucb ahead of /usr/bin in their PATH.
I don't know when Netcom went to System V, but it could very well have
happened during that last round of system-wide upgrades, if their OS
software vendor switched from BSD as part of the new release. The
Netcom admins may not have even consciously decided to switch. There
are still a lot of systems out there running older BSD software (e.g.,
SunOS 4.1.3), and when their owners finally break down and cough up the
bucks to upgrade to Solaris they suddenly have System V. This can be a
rather rude surprise. Been there, done that.
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(tsalagi)_|see_.sig|
Rick Snover <rsn...@SPAMLESS.ix.netcom.com> wrote,
regarding "Hm, System V":
>I don't know when Netcom went to System V, but it could very well have
>happened during that last round of system-wide upgrades, if their OS
>software vendor switched from BSD as part of the new release. The
>Netcom admins may not have even consciously decided to switch. There
>are still a lot of systems out there running older BSD software (e.g.,
>SunOS 4.1.3), and when their owners finally break down and cough up the
>bucks to upgrade to Solaris they suddenly have System V. This can be a
>rather rude surprise. Been there, done that.
Netcom's still running SunOS 4.1.4 on the shell machines (that's a step up
from 4.1.3, which is what we've had for ages), but I was telnetting to the
NNTP machines yesterday (just to verify their existence, and whether I could
reach them from my Linux box), and I noticed that all of them except
nntp.netcom.com had been upgraded to System V.
Someone's been playing with some shiny new toys. :-)
It's going to be tres fun when Netcom gets around to upgrading the shell
machines. Whiz-bang *crash* *tinkle* "#@$%&!!" ... :-)
tsalagi
"Save the pieces to patch the places, folks!"
Rick Snover
>In article <702c4q$6...@dfw-ixnews8.ix.netcom.com>,
>Rick Snover <rsn...@SPAMLESS.ix.netcom.com> wrote,
>regarding "Hm, System V":
>
>>I don't know when Netcom went to System V, but it could very well have
>>happened during that last round of system-wide upgrades, if their OS
>>software vendor switched from BSD as part of the new release. The
>>Netcom admins may not have even consciously decided to switch. There
>>are still a lot of systems out there running older BSD software (e.g.,
>>SunOS 4.1.3), and when their owners finally break down and cough up the
>>bucks to upgrade to Solaris they suddenly have System V. This can be a
>>rather rude surprise. Been there, done that.
>
>Netcom's still running SunOS 4.1.4 on the shell machines (that's a step up
>from 4.1.3, which is what we've had for ages), but I was telnetting to the
>NNTP machines yesterday (just to verify their existence, and whether I could
>reach them from my Linux box), and I noticed that all of them except
>nntp.netcom.com had been upgraded to System V.
Did /etc/motd on those nntp servers say which version of SunOS? System
V was always an option you could select during the install, even as far
back as SunOS 4.0, if I remember correctly. Someone may have selected
it without even understanding the implications.
>Someone's been playing with some shiny new toys. :-)
>
>It's going to be tres fun when Netcom gets around to upgrading the shell
>machines. Whiz-bang *crash* *tinkle* "#@$%&!!" ... :-)
Yep, especially if anyone's written any programs that use shared
libraries or system calls, or shell scripts that depend on BSD command
behavior, or... Of course, that's probably one reason they haven't
upgraded the shell machines yet.
Almost makes me glad I don't have a shell account.