[NCSA-discuss] SCO nfs

[Joseph Mack NA3T]

On Tue, 8 May 2012, Steve Wolfe wrote:

> one of the parts of this discussion that got lost in the dust is that
> with hardware this old
>  - a 2nd kit should be very inexpensive with old used gear.
>  - Referbers abound and it would be worth while to bring up a 2nd box.

the guy is intellegent and at the moment thinks he's just up 
for a bigger disk and something to back it up. Presumably he 
thought with support from SCO, and his backups, he could 
could regard the computing part of his business as a solved 
problem. It has worked that way for many years. Now he's up 
against several bumpers. He's trapped in old hardware, his 
backups to the same tapes for maybe 10yrs are probably 
worthless (the magnetic material has worn off) and SCO is 
not the way to go for the future. He hasn't needed his 
backups as no-one has ever deleted a ledger.

> Yet the echos of low money / no money in this case is almost insane.
> Interesting but insane.
>
> He can't / won't afford even this conversation with you.
> Yet if his box craters .. then what does he do?

He doesn't know about his box cratering yet. He's had maybe 
10yrs of computing without a minute's down time. I expect 
when I point out the situation he's in that he'll hop to it 
and arrange for something to be done pronto.

There's lots of ways out here. He's got to leapfrog forward 
about 10yrs in hardware/OS and from now on keep on top of 
all the changes in these things. He hasn't cared. His 
day-to-day business doesn't need to know that disks are SATA 
and not IDE, anymore than when cars changed from 
carburettors to fuel injection. However if he can't get his 
car/computer serviced, then his business will be affected.

I have to find the options, tell him the advantages, 
disadvantages, the disruption of changeover for each option 
and let him decide. My problem is finding all the options.

>From what I can tell from the past few day's discussions 
here, the best option might be a canned VM appliance from 
SCO (available for 5.0.7 - he's running 5.0.4 now and 
presumably his accounting app will be OK in the upgraded 
OS). The VM appliances exist, presumably will handle the 
multiport serial card problem which Craig talked aobut and 
will be "darkly cheap". The (32 bit) VM appliance could run 
inside a nice new 64 bit machine with PCIe bus, nice 
graphics, a big monitor and 4G memory. He could have a 
couple of curses/vt100's displayed at once.

At least that seems best right now.

> Its a little like a job interview I had 3 years ago where 
> a IT department of 100 got shrunk to 10 and had barely 
> managed to keep going.  My job would have been to replace 
> the the jack of all things Operating System -- and I am 
> thankful that few could fill his shoes - not I.

hell on wheels

Joe

-- 
Joseph Mack NA3T EME(B,D), FM05lw North Carolina
jmack (at) wm7d (dot) net - azimuthal equidistant map
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