A.P. Lawrence

Old SCO licenses

(Traditional format)

Mon Sep 27 20:52:43 2004 Old SCO licenses
Posted by Tony Lawrence
Search Keys: upgrades

Last week I had a call from a another reseller who wanted to get 5.0.4 user bump licenses for SCO. He ended up doing something that is probably not entirely legal, but given the frustration he went through, I can't say I blame him. Here's what he had to say after all the smoke settled:

Thanks for speaking with me last week and steering me towards Seneca . I talked with a rep there and he pitched right in to help out. Here's the rest of the story:

SCO dragged their <you know what's> for 3 days, saying they needed to do a "template" since the OS was so old, then failing to respond to the dist. rep at all. He stayed in touch with me via email and phone so he sure did his job (and earned some future biz). Finally, after a nasty gram from him they got back and said "no problem, V5.0.6 licenses work just fine...". Of course, that was contrary to what I'd been told but by that time it did not matter.

My client simply could not wait. After conversion from 5.0.4 to the 5.0.5 eBay copy (just to get the better hardware to work) I had no choice but to work around the problem. I even considered punching up some Java and doing distributed network I/O to Informix on a Linux box to get around the user limit issue that had magnified during the upgrade. The whole thing just made me mad and I've never been defeated in a computer problem in over 30 years so I really didn't want have this one get the best of me. (OK, so I'm not humble and I take things like this personally...)

After digging around on your site and on the net in general, I found some useful items. It really only took two significant changes to get everything running error free: 1) I used /etc/tunek to up the kernel params for another 50 users 2) Doubled the number of TCP connections and pseudo-TTY's and then relinked the kernel. All session/pipe/license problems vanished and the system thinks it has 100 users on it (w | head) before complaining about "All licenses in use". As long as we log in all the old LAN based Telnet sessions from PC's and NC's first, all the X-Windows users don't have a problem running 5 or more X-Terms each (times 10 users). Since it's all Informix SE based, it uses a LOT of pipes and sockets hence the need to bump the TCP params in netconfig (ADM).

Your site is one of the very most informative and complete out there. I really like your attitude towards integrity, value, etc. Keep up the good work.

Psst - Wanna work for yourself?

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