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From: tony@aplawrence.com (Tony Lawrence)
Subject: Re: Self defense for SCO users
Date: 20 May 2004 05:38:21 -0700
Message-ID: <bc2b8a97.0405200438.67dedd3@posting.google.com> 
References: <bc2b8a97.0405190301.4b0be3b6@posting.google.com> <5dona053jgbgckbno4btts81hkakmciehg@4ax.com> 


FyRE <FyRE@toktik.demon.ku.oc.x> wrote in message news:<5dona053jgbgckbno4btts81hkakmciehg@4ax.com>...
> On 19 May 2004 04:01:20 -0700, tony@aplawrence.com (Tony Lawrence)
> wrote:
> 
> >I've written up some suggestions for SCO users who may be concerned
> >about their future: http://aplawrence.com/OSR5/selfdefense.html
> >
> >If there are suggestions I didn't think of, feel free to add them as
> >comments there or here and I certainly will incorporate them.
> 
> I presume this is a set of howtos for SCO licencees who end up being
> dragged into court by Darl and his merry band of thugs?
> 
> BTW, there's no such thing as a "SCO user"; there are only "non-SCO
> users", and "potential defendants"...

Unfortunately, there are SCO users.  For example, I have a client who
has a system used to collect data from some satellite.  The board that
gets the bytes isn't made anymore, but fortunately he has found spares
on eBay.  The original software is abandoned by its authors.  I've
written a bunch of Perl scripts to process the data (originally there
were awful awk scripts).

I've moved MOST of the system to a Linux box.  The SCO system still
has to talk to the satellite, but after that, I do all my stuff on
Linux.  Unfortunately, there's also some legacy DOS stuff - I've
looked at that, and I can rewrite it in Perl, and thereby get rid of
that too, but there isn't a budget to get that part done right now.

The problem is that everything works, and we have spare parts to keep
it all working for many years.  With considerable expense, we can
rewrite everything, find something new that will talk to the
satellite, and  move away from SCO and DOS 3.1.  But the customer
really doesn't want to bite that bullet, and I don't blame him. He
also doesn't want to move to Windows as the SCO has been an incredibly
reliable workhorse for him over many, many years. This is a 24 x 7
operation, and it's all critical to their customers (the ultimate
consumers of what my Perl scripts produce).  We have deadman checks
that set off alarms if data hasn't arrived where it is supposed to
when it is supposed to, and naturally this includes the SCO side, the
DOS boxen, the Linux, and a Windows ftp server.  It's all very
complicated, dozens of inputs, dozens of outputs, some totally
independent from SCO, some not, but the point is that this isn't just
replacing a word processor.

Last night someone came in and upgraded the Linux from RH8 to RH9.  I
have no idea why yet, but that broke some of my scripts.  Alarms
started going off, and I got called, the SCO machine wasn't getting
its feedback that the Linux box had processed the data even though in
fact it had.   Well, the problem was mostly silly and stupid: the
boxen are supposed to run GMT timezone but the upgrade helpfully
changed that.  From the deadman codes point of view, the Linux data
was five hours old.  I fixed that quickly, but then also noted that
the Linux box was hanging mounting the NT box to double check that
files really had arrived there.  That wasc setting off a different
alarm.  Rebooting Linux "fixed" it.  I suspect that this was because
the upgrade had not been rebooted after running "up2date"; the person
who did the upgrade hadn't been able to stay late enough to finish
that part up.

Customer wasn't happy about this.  I don't blame him. It kept both him
and me up later than either of us like, and cost him money.  Yet the
SCO box continued to do its thing as best it could, costing him
nothing but the electricity to run it.  It has been upgraded from
3.2v4.2 to 3.2v5.06 in several stages and has been uncomplaining and
reliable at each stage (except once when we had some scsi problems on
a new box, but that's hardware).  For years and years and years, it
has eaten bytes from space and translated those into ascii files that
someone else needs badly enough to pay serious money for.  It does its
job.

And that's the point, FyRE: this is about business, business needs,
business realities.  This guy is a small, 5 or 6 person outfit
operating out of a house converted to office space.  The server room
is the cellar.  There aren't piles of hundred dollar bills lying
around that I ever noticed, and the driveway isn't filled with
Lamborghini's.  He has to be "real" about money, and he can't incur
large expenses just because a few Linzoid jackasses think he is the
devil's spawn for daring to use an OS they hate.  We know we have
problems here: the fact that the i/o board and the software are
abandoned is important, and we know ee have to address that.  But he
doesn't have an unlimited budget, so we have to take it slowly.

--
Tony Lawrence
http://aplawrence.com

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