NT vs. Unix

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From - Sat Apr 29 11:08:41 2000
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Date: Sat, 29 Apr 2000 11:01:09 -0400
From: Ben Rosenthal <bcrosen@attglobal.net>
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Subject: Re: Cranky Guru's in NG
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Tony Lawrence wrote:

> Chad Lemmen wrote:
> >  I've tried
> > posting to some of the Windows newgroups, but never got any intelligent
> > answers in there if any answers at all.
>
> It's not their fault.  There are no intelligent answers for
> Windows problems.
>
> Actually, I'm at least half serious.
>
> I was working with an NT administrator yesterday on a Unix
> problem.  What had happened was that we had installed a few
> things: a RealWorld upgrade, Visionfs 3.0, and Powerchute
> software. After all that, people couldn't print any more.
> It took me a little bit of work to track this down, because
> the NT guys trouble shooting skills were poor- here's what I
> was initially told:
>
> - none of the printers work, including a serial dot matrix.
> - the printers work fine from the command line, but not from
> RealWorld
>
> I first had him check /usr/spool/lp/tmp and
> /usr/spool/lp/logs/requests and learned
>  that nothing was backing up in the spool directory, but the
> log files showed that the RealWorld jobs had been printed.
>
> My first suspicion was RealWorld configuration, but I
> eliminated that pretty quickly.  It then turned out that all
> of his command line tests were done as root, and all of his
> RealWorld tests were done as an ordinary user.   I had him
> try Realwoorld as root, and it worked.  So the reality was
> now that printing worked for root, but not for ordinary
> users.  That, of course, made my suspicious of perms on lp,
> but those were OK.    I wasn't thinking of anything related
> to hpnp because the serial printer didn't work either.
>
> Ah, but it turned out that that wasn't quite true either-
> the serial printer had been disabled and also was not even
> accepting requests.  In fact, upon close reexamination,
> there were no entries for the serial printer in the logs.
> So I ran /usr/lib/accept and enabled it and now I knew that
> the problem really related to the HP network printers only.
> But it couldn't be a network problem because root could
> print.  Therefore it had to be related to something the hp
> script does.
>
> If you look at the HPNP interface script in
> /usr/lib/hpnp/hpnp.model, you see that it also writes its
> own log file in /tmp, and only removes it if the print is
> successful- so I looked in /tmp, but there were no hpnp log
> files.  I then checked perms on /tmp, and saw why- it had no
> write permission.  How did that happen?  I doubtedcit was
> RW, and it sure couldn't have been Visionfs, so that left
> APC Powerchute, and tha indeed was the source.
>
> The actual problem was that the Powerchute install script
> stupidly changes perms on the directory it is installed from
> (why?).  It had changed /tmp and caused the failure.
>
> Two comments the NT admin made bothered me.  The first was
> "I wouldn't have known where to look".  OK, that's fair
> enough, but there are two unrelated things to point out in
> that regard.  The first is that at least you CAN look (you
> can't look at the innards of NT's printing system).  The
> second is that his trouble shooting wasn't very good- using
> root to test command line printing and an ordinary user to
> test RW clouded the real issue, and not noticing that the
> serial printer jobs did NOT appear in the lp logs also
> masked the real issue.  But, I can't complain too much- I
> earn a good living because my trouble shooting skills ARE
> good, and I can't expect everyone to have such skills- if
> everyone did, I'd be broke!
>
> It was the second comment that really bothered me:  "It's
> this kind of stuff that drives people to NT- I've got to
> find an NT accounting system".
>
> Cripes!!!

It's just plain laziness.  He does not want to invest the time to learn the
basics so he can solve this type of problem himself.  He does not realize
that the time spent learning UNIX pays dividends in flexibility and
reliability.  Administering UNIX allows one to be responsible for the success
of the system, but this is too much responsibility for some people.  If you
can not configure or troubleshoot the OS operation then you are not
responsible for any problems.  People who like UNIX like the ability to
control the OS.

>
> Like Powerchute or some other vendor couldn't screw up your
> life on NT?  And if they do, just how in hell are you going
> to fix it?  Chances are, you won't- not without help from
> them, assuming they even know what happened.  Most NT
> "fixes" I've seen have been reinstalls or gross restoration
> of the registry- certainly the skills of a typical
> administrator do not allow for very much poking around to
> identify the real source of a problem.  If something like
> that had happened on NT, I bet it wouldn't have been fixed
> for days, and probably would have required direct assistance
> from HP.
>
> Oh well.  I'm sure that company will dump its "awful Unix"
> box as soon as it can.  Such a shame, isn't it?

Yes, but I have a customer that was a staunch NT shop and now really respects
the SCO uptime.

>
>
> --
> Tony Lawrence (tony@aplawrence.com)
> SCO/Linux articles, help, book reviews, tests,
> job listings and more : 

Ben Rosenthal
BRC
Optical Retail POS Solutions

Take Control of Your Domain Names

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