On Thu, Oct 04, 2007, Jeff Liebermann wrote:
>smlunatick <yveslec@gmail.com> hath wroth:
>
>>With the chapter 11 filing and other recommendations, what is a good,
>>long time viable alternative to SCO OpenServer?
>
>For long term, probably a mainframe. It really depends on how you
>long you consider long term and what you're doing with OpenServer. For
>data dumpsters, I've been using NAS (network attached sewer). For
>servers that require services and application servers, FreeBSD or
>Windoze 2000/2003 server, depending on the service, application, and
>religious mix. For desktops, mostly Windoze 2000 or XP, and a weird
>mix of Linux mutations. There's no single solution that works for
>everything.

Most of our servers have been running on Linux or FreeBSD for years (it's
not like the future of SCO hasn't been in doubt for at least five years).
Our first mission-critical Linux installation at a customer's was done in
September 1997, and we have been moving our customers from SCO Xenix and
OpenServer to Linux for the last decade, first Caldera, then SuSE, and
we're starting to use CentOS now.

We've done a few FreeBSD systems, and have one in-house that has only been
rebooted once in the last four years, that due to an extended power failure
in the wee hours of the morning so it wasn't switched to generator before
the UPS batteries died.

We still have one OSR 5.0.6a system in-house for support for the few
OpenServer systems our customers still have in use, but most of them have
been moved to Linux or FreeBSD over the last 5 or 6 years.

All of our in-house desktops are running Mac OS X, and we have migrated
many of our customer's desktops to it as well including a bunch that were
running diskless Linux boxes primarily as data entry terminals.

>However, I have a question: Why do you consider chapter 11 to be
>justification for a move from OSR5? I can see it if you're a software
>developer and OpenServer is one of your target platforms. However, if
>you're currently running OSR5, and it works, I don't see much reason
>to switch to something else. I still have several 3.2v5.0.4
>customers. Also one Xenix customer. I'm still running ODT 3.2v4.2 in
>my office. Except for MMDF (which I'm too lazy to fix), everything
>works just fine.

The biggest issue is hardware on the older systems. Currently available
hardware often doesn't support things like the ISA Specialix multi-port
boards we used on many of our SCO Xenix and OpenServer installations, not
to mention things like customer running 80286 Xenix binaries. Even
discounting the problems of support for '286 binaries, there are often
timing issues running old SCO binary applications on new fast hardware.

We still have a Xenix and an OSR 3.2v4.2 system in the rack in case I need
to do some kind of hardware recovery, but neither of these has been booted
in years.

Bill
--
INTERNET: bill@celestial.com Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
URL: http://www.celestial.com/ PO Box 820; 6641 E. Mercer Way
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