-- Brian Leverson, Systems Manager University of Washington e-mail: brian_at_aa.washington.edu Dept of Aeronautics and Astronautics phone: (206)543-6736 Box 352400 FAX: (206)543-0217 Seattle, WA 98195-2400 ======================================================================== From: "Per Andersen" <p.andersen_at_ttu.edu> Subject: Re: Student Users NT/VMS/DU Date: Mon, 9 Mar 1998 16:58:56 -0600 We're continuing to provide students and faculty with VMS accounts for email. We just added an Alphaserver 4000 running OpenVMS to our campus email system. This gives us the 4000 and a 2100 for email. Student web pages are available, but only on a Alphaserver 800 running 4.0B DU system. The DU account also gives the students email/pop/imap but it's not encouraged. A number of departments on campus run their own email servers. NT mail servers are growing in numbers, I don't see us using NT in the short term for student email but I do see it being used for faculty and staff. About half of our department has gone to NT and the Administrative Information Systems group is in the process of migrating from a MVS mail system to NT. Groupware products like scheduler+ is one of the reasons for migrating staff to NT. Steve Downing (s.downing_at_ttu.edu) our VMS systems administrator can give you more information on the VMS systems, I'm the UNIX systems administrator. Per Andersen Systems Programmer ACS - Texas Tech University p.andersen_at_ttu.edu ======================================================================== From: "Jim R Jones"<Jim_R_Jones_at_notesbridge.cummins.com> Date: Mon, 9 Mar 1998 17:56:29 -0500 Subject: Re: Student Users NT/VMS/DU I feel sorry for you that management has made a decision that will increase your workload, provide additional hours of work, and limit your ability to effectively trouble shoot a problem remotely. If you did a survey and asked how many ISPs use windows NT versus some flavor of UNIX or even Linux. I will bet my last dollar that NT systems are a small minority as compared to UNIX or Linux systems. The task you listed are the same basic task that an ISP provide. What do they use? The following points I will make for you and let you work with your management: 1. POP3 server have been proven under UNIX systems for years, NT is still working out the issues on POP3 servers and has no IMAP support. 2. Users can retrieve email on Unix system via pop3, imap client or interactively using pine or elm. You cannot do this with windows NT. Windows NT does not have interactive accounts. 3. The best webservers and fast webservers reside on Unix systems, (see last month BYTE for a review), and Apache the most used webserver on the internet was written for Unix. Plus apache is free. One question is how many students will you have and how many windows NT system will you use to support them? An Intel machine does not equate to an alpha machine. Also one alpha running 64bit unix or VMS is faster than a alpha running a 32bit windows nt system. Plus, the webserver that comes with windowsNT is not robust. Now one that I know uses it for commercial use. 4. With Unix, VMS, you have easy system management from a remote site, you have a command line interface. With windows NT you are going to run a gui interface over a 33.6 modem??? It will take minutes just to paint the screen. 5. Support lets not forget that, look at your support enviroment now than double it, especially for remote users. The above is my point of view hopes it helps. jim jones ======================================================================== From: bbahnmil_at_redwood.dn.hac.com (Bryan Bahnmiller) Date: Mon, 9 Mar 1998 16:05:32 -0700 Subject: Re: Student Users NT/VMS/DU Jon, I see the same garbage from my management. "The future is NT." If you want to lock yourself into a proprietary OS and associated tools fine. I personally don't agree. If you want a nice performing machine, get a disk, schedule some downtime, and install Linux on your 2100. You should be able to set it up to dual-boot either VMS or Linux. This would get you away from the proprietary issues. I don't know if DEC would cut you a trade-in deal for DEC Unix on your 2100 or not, but that would be another option. Of course, this means you would be lockd into a vendor's OS, but at least you can use all sorts of freeware compilers and tools. (You might mention to DEC that a big problem with both VMS and DEC Unix is "user" licensing - i.e. each interactive user requires a "user" license.) There are a number of ISPs in the "real world" that have retired their NT Web servers, ftp servers, etc. because they cannot meet their performance needs. A Linux web server will easily out-perform an NT web server on the same hardware. It shouldn't be too hard to find some statistics on different Linux web sites. We have found that it costs about the same amount of money to deploy a PC seat on our network, as it does to deploy a Unix seat. If you make the PC seats all NT, it would be even more expensive. The general cost according to some analysts, run about $13,000 a seat on a corporate network. Check out the April 1998 issue of Unix Review. There is an article about Mission-Critical Web Databases. The article is also on the web at: http://www.future-focus.com/press_fset.html The author also refers to the fallacy "that NT is cheaper." I am the team lead for a group of 12 Unix systems administrators. I do have some Unix bias. I truly believe the most robust OS is still VMS. I still think NT is about 7-10 years behind Unix (and Unix is about 5 years behind VMS.) I do run NT on my PC at home (I also run Linux.) These are just my opinions. These are not the opinions of my employer. Bryan ======================================================================== From: Susan Rodriguez <SUSROD_at_HBSI.COM> Subject: RE: Student Users NT/VMS/DU Date: Mon, 9 Mar 1998 15:08:57 -0800 You're right NT does have a lot of shortcomings. But it also has one thing that UNIX does not - an easy user interface. I continue to see the same trend in companies that I do/have worked for or with - use NT for the user end, where there are novice or casual computer users. It's an ideal enviroment for someone who only wants e-mail and web access, and maybe a little word processing/spreadsheet capability mixed in. No one comes close to NT for this. The only OS that was ever even in the running against Windoze type OS's was the NeXt Step flavor of UNIX and they sold out to Apple and disappeared. It's definitely an advantage to have UNIX on the backend running your oracle databases, your firewalls, web servers, and other mission critical, server oriented services. Those serious users who want to live in both worlds can run something like Reflections (tm) to emulate CDE, etc. if they want an XWin environment. I sit only a few miles from Microsoft headquaters in Redmond WA, so it's easy for me to say that NT is the way of all things, but I'm not a natural advocate of the "Evil Empire" - it's just plain truth that NT is the way to go for users with low levels of expertise. Our Alpha 4100 came with an NT license and it felt unatural to see that Windoze logon screen when I walked by. Unix will always be my OS of choice, but I'm just as happy that the marketing folks upstairs have NT accounts. susrod_at_hbsi.com ======================================================================== From: Peter Stern <peter_at_wiscpa.weizmann.ac.il> Subject: Re: Student Users NT/VMS/DU Date: Tue, 10 Mar 1998 09:02:37 +0200 (IST) Dear Jon: I don't know if you know this, but I heard recently from a local VMS support person that the next version of VMS (7.2?) due out in a few months is supposed to be "compatible" with WNT. Again, I don't know exactly what that means, but it seems like a good way to make the transition. Regards, Peter Stern ======================================================================== Date: Tue, 10 Mar 1998 09:58:31 +0100 (MET) From: Lucio Chiappetti <lucio_at_ifctr.mi.cnr.it> To: Jon Eidson <eidson_at_unix4.is.tcu.edu> Subject: Re: Student Users NT/VMS/DU Hello, we are a small research institute with a number of students, graduate students and guests. In a remote past we used to access a mainframe as general services and have our own mini for science. The mainframe was on lease and managed by our parent organization. Of course that became anti-economic quite a while ago. When we started replacing the mini with Sun workstations, we also moved all general accounts to a VMS machine (a VAX 8200). This machine was not ours but supplied by one of our fund suppliers (Italian Space Agency) so again we were depending on them for maintenance (and that too became anti-economic quite soon). People liked the VAX as a general support machine (that meant e-mail, at the time on Decnet/SPAN, editing, LaTeX and general computing). Our current arrangement is three-fold (with the exception of one person which still has a Vaxstation). - the machine park for scientific use is Unix, mostly Suns, and three Alphas (again the latter belong to the Italian Space Agency). In the past we managed all Unix w/s (then Suns and Ultrix) in a fully coordinated way. That meant we had NIS accounts capable of logging everywhere, and enforced a common set of software and command aliases on all machine. Now we still have NIS, but have separated the machines into "clusters". With the exception of a small one acting as generic server (nameserver, NIS master, WWW server, mail exchanger and scratch disk space), users of one team (high energy, cosmology, detectors, etc.) can log on only on machines of that group. Also for s/w we have some institute common s/w and some cluster common s/w. It is possible for the generic account holder to have its own web space, but we do not encourage it for individuals (while it is supported by "projects", in fact we have even two auxiliary httpd servers) The personal web space is on user's home (which can be automounted by the server). Staff usually have a workstation on their desk, while students access workstations in a common area (some clusters "assign" a student to a particular machine, while other let them "float"). E-mail for Unix users is directed either to their personal w/s or to a cluster server. People use either Pine or mailtool. - a PC and Mac park is used mainly for document production by people involved in projects (and by the administration). These machines are not managed centrally so far. They mostly reside on the desks of staff or contractors (some advisors let their students use it). PC users use Pine to read mail via imap from the Unix server. They in general do not have a full account (unless they travel a lot, in which case they have a Unix account). - our detector group decided to go to NT. They acquired an Intel dual processor NT server. At the time they installed the Citrix Wincenter. As far as I understand that is (was) an extension to NT 3.x (developed under license from Microsoft) giving multiuser capability, and is no longer supported since Microsoft bought Citrix and plans to incorporate this capability in the next release of NT. This group has one NT server, and four X terminals (in addition they have a couple of Suns and some PCs). Note that Wincenter allows Unix users to access an NT session on their X console, just doing xhost +ntmachine ; rsh ntmachine wincenter -display `hostname` this facility is used by people of the group, and a few other "friends" (I'm one of them and rather happy to run MS Word on my Alpha this way). We are unable for manpower reason to support this at institute level. So NT users run either "office" tools or scientific analysis s/w (e.g. IDL) either from the NT console, from X terminals, or from a Unix workstation. They read mail via Pine and imapd from a Unix imap server. In addition they use the NT server to authenticate logins on their PCs. They have also set up some integration of disk space between Unix and NT using SAMBA (I also plan to that on my Alpha). As far as I know, NT has no "command line mode", and therefore must be run from a window-capable terminal (console, X terminal or remote X display on Unix). We have now abandoned dumb terminals (but we had some until we kept the Vax), but that should be an easy and cheap way to access a "general purpose machine" (and also one need terminal access to telnet in ... I doubt NT offers telnet-in capability). ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Lucio Chiappetti - IFCTR/CNR - via Bassini 15 - I-20133 Milano (Italy) ======================================================================== From: Gyula Szokoly <szgyula_at_tarkus.pha.jhu.edu> Subject: Re: Student Users NT/VMS/DU Date: Tue, 10 Mar 1998 04:15:43 -0500 (EST) Hi, I'm missing something here. NT and VMS/Unix is not comperable. Different approach to computing. In the NT world, every 'workstation' has to be way powerfull to be useful. In the VMS/Unix world, you can give the user a vt100, link it to a terminal server and (s)he can do a lot of stuff. Did the oh so knowledgable management investigate what those 'little things' are that users do beyond mail, web, etc.? I start 1 week type jobs quite often. What does the NT world offer for me? I sure won't sleep with an NT machine running in my bedroom (courtesy of the University...). As for us: No, there is no plan whatsoever to get rid of the big servers. NT is penetrating, but as a low end dekstop. They are not even replacing unix workstations. In our group we have like 40 CPU's. One is running NT, the rest is Unix (and one VMS). Machines at home are mostly dual boot. I just can't get my work done on NT as many applications are not available. The real question is: can you *really* elliminate central servers? Will you have the manpower to maintain the huge number of NT workstations (and W-95 machines) that the proposed setup will need? Canonical numbers are one person for every 5 NT hosts, as opposed to one for a few hundred Unix machines (we run 400 hosts with 3 sysadmins, one part time -- all Unix of course). In the Unix/VMS picture, *few* machines are well maintained, and lots of small, stupid machines are used to connect to the big servers. In the NT world, a small, dinky box somewhere (the server) which provides nominal help to the nearly standalone workstations. Do you really want to run around and install software on every single workstation (at the console, of course)? Do you realize that you will have a huge number of big CPU's sitting idle most of the time (can't really do anything useful unless you are using the GUI)? Can you afford it? Gyula ======================================================================== Date: Tue, 10 Mar 1998 10:56:11 +0100 (MET) From: "Pedro J. Lobo" <pjlobo_at_euitt.upm.es> Subject: Re: Student Users NT/VMS/DU My university is also heading to NT. The reason is mostly financial (M$ has very low prices to high-volume customers, like a university). And we the poor system admins have to live with it, but... In my experience, administering NT is... well... funny. Everything you are used to do in a Un*x machine (I suppose the same applies to VMS) in minutes or a few hours takes you an order of magnitude more. Installing an application on the network is a nightmare. To be more precise, the NT network I administer has about 20 NT Workstation machines (will grow to about 40-50) and one server, and I have about 500-600 user accounts (will grow to 2000-2500). Not a very large one, really. I only use one NT domain (may the gods help you if you've got to use more than one domain). I mantain the same accounts on NT and on my Digital Unix machine, but that's another problem (I'm writing a custom application to mantain the accounts syncrhronized). Just installing NT workstation is somewhat painful, but you can end with a mostly automated installation. I haven't used them, but I know there are third party tools that will ease the process. The real nightmare comes when installing applications. For example, M$ Office has a network installation. However, you must do the network installation and then a local installation on each machine you want to run Office on. Again, with some tools (M$ Zero Administration Kit or SMS may help) you can more or less automate the local installations. However, there are parts of Office that doesn't work from a "mortal" user account. For example, some parts of powerpoint. This is a technical school and our students do some programming, so I've installed Visual C++ and Visual Basic, both version 5.0. Well, neither of them have a network installation, so you have to do a local install, or install them on a network drive and play with the registry to fool NT. Ok, it's just some hours (or days) of work. But, then comes the funny part. Visual C++ stores its temporary help files in a directory which lies under the installation point. Yeah, it's ok, isn't it? Normally, when an administrator installs some application, all users are given permission to write the application's files and directories, aren't they? Ok, just some more time to find the registry keys that tells M$ Internet Explorer 3.0 (which is the core of the VC++ 5 help system) where to store its temporary files, and you're done. Moving on to Vsual Basic. Well, M$ did it. With VC++ you had to play with the registry. With VB, you can't even do that. It stores its temporari help files (it doesn't use IE 3.0, but the "old" windows help system) in \winnt\help, which contains also some of the NT help files. And you can't change it. So my users can't use all of the VB help system (no, I *WON'T* let them permission to write new files to a directory other than \temp). So, you may see how things work. Oh, did I mention that NT is the first multiuser system I've ever seen that doesn't support disk quotas? I had to buy a third party package... And DHCP configuration includes the IP address, etc, etc, and tne DNS name, but NOT the "M$ network" name. So, if you end having to assign a name to each machine by hand, and storing it in the HD, what do you want DHCP for? Or the "roaming profiles". Do you want to have tens of MBytes "roaming" through your net each time a user logs in? Buy NT, use roaming profiles, let the users log in and see their profiles grow with M$ Word documents, temporary files, and even applications (my users used to install IRC clients in their profiles). Chances are that you will end up using NT, but don't say you haven't been warned... ;-) ------------------------------------------------------------------- Pedro Jos=E9 Lobo Perea Tel: +34 1 336 78 19 Centro de C=E1lculo Fax: +34 1 331 92 29 EUIT Telecomunicaci=F3n - UPM e-mail: pjlobo_at_euitt.upm.es ======================================================================== Date: Tue, 10 Mar 1998 10:06:57 GMT From: Aideen McConville <aideen_at_persimmon.co.uk> Subject: Re: Student Users NT/VMS/DU Hi Jon, No first hand experience, just a pointer to some resources which may help support your case (or at least further highlight the problems!). O'Reilly book: Windows NT User Administration By Ashley J. Meggitt & Timothy D. Ritchey http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/winuser/ See also: http://www.ukuug.org/events/index.shtml#LISA You probably won't be able to attend since it's in the UK(!), but you might be able to contact some of the authors/presenters or obtain proceedings after the conference. Regards, Aideen -- Aideen McConville Phone: +44 1223 578761 Persimmon IT Inc Fax: +44 1223 322501 The Westbrook Centre, Milton Road email: aideen_at_persimmon.com Cambridge, UK, CB41YG http://www.persimmon.com/ ======================================================================== >From bryan_at_compgen.com Tue Mar 10 07:27:43 1998 Date: Tue, 10 Mar 1998 08:27:41 -0500 (EST) From: "Bryan E. Rank" <bryan_at_compgen.com> Subject: Re: Student Users NT/VMS/DU Hi John, I had a hand in setting up a lab of 40 or so NT boxes and 3 big NT servers at the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. We were entirely a unix shop before hand and were forced by a donation to support NT. The upshot was that it takes roughly 1 person per 40 nt machines in a lab environment. Every additional 40 machines would probably add another .5 to .75 people depending on how good your first one is. The admin/management does not lend itself particularly well to automation. The servers will not scale as there was no workable provision for hierarchical software distribution (trust realationships are/were n^2 with the number of domains). Network mounting of most software packages (all need at least some local disk space and getting several people using a shared copy can get tricky) so local installs were done routinely. Servers would lockup with no useful logging and require rebooting weekly. In all I believe that you are in for a nightmare as upgrading one machine requires upgrading all of them. If you are lucky and get all machines in big batches with the *same* hardware, you could use one of the automated tools to do distribution, I know Seagate puts one out. I don't mean to sound negative, but my impression of the NT environment from and admin perspective still gives me nightmares. In all fairness, this was over a year ago when 4.0 first came out, things my have changed since then, but you will *always* be at the mercy of Microsoft. Bryan Rank ======================================================================== Date: Tue, 10 Mar 1998 09:09:38 -0500 (EST) From: Karen Byrd <BYRD_at_mscf.med.upenn.edu> Subject: Re: Student Users NT/VMS/DU What reasons do your management give for wanting to abandon VMS for NT other than hype? Why change a platform if there are no concrete reasons for doing so? What does NT deliver to your users that VMS doesn't? Also it might make sense to ask this on comp.os.vms rather than here where many people know DU only. VMS people can give you lots of reasons why you should stay with it: security, flexibility, ease of management, better documentation. At for our site, we use DU for what you are using VMS for, VMS for Oracle and research software(GCG) and NT for fileserver usage. We don't use NT for anything really important and production level where many, many users are heavily dependent on the server. I don't see this changing in the immediate future. ___________________________________________________________________ Karen Y. Byrd C511 Richards Bldg. Systems Manager 3700 Hamilton Wlk. Univ. of Pa. Philadelphia, PA 19104-6062 School of Medicine Voice: 215/898-6865 Computing and Info. Tech. Fax: 215/573-2277 byrd_at_mscf.med.upenn.edu ======================================================================== Date: Tue, 10 Mar 1998 08:24:01 -0600 From: "H. Blakely Williford" <blakew_at_fullerbrush.com> Subject: Re: Student Users NT/VMS/DU We will be on VMS for a long time here. We are haveing more unix machines come in; but that is because the applications that our users need was only found on the unix platform. -- H. Blakely Williford | Men never do evil so completely & cheerfully Systems Programer/Administrator | as when they do it with religious conviction. The Fuller Brush Company | - Blaise Pascal ======================================================================== Date: Tue, 10 Mar 1998 08:22:31 -0600 (CST) From: matthias.johnson_at_mankato.msus.edu Subject: Re: Student Users NT/VMS/DU Jon, Here Mankato State University we also feel a push towards NT. However at this point we are using essentially two DU systems. One is a dedicated mail server on which all students and faculty automatically receive an account (about 15 thousand) the other is a request only system primarily intended for computer science classes (programming assignments, research). However this second system is fast becoming the primary web server since we are slowly phasing out our VAX VMS system. When the decision was made to use DU as our mail server we also looked at NT as a viable option. If I remember the numbers correctly we would have needed about 16 systems running NT (there is some sort of limit on the number of users, but I do not recall the details) as opposed to 1 DU machine. Administration is clearly easier for one machine. In addition I believe there was no means of automatically adding users to a NT box, whereas under DU we do it with a few fairly simple scripts. Hope this helps. - johnny waveswaveswaves bye-bye Matthias E. Johnson http://krypton.mankato.msus.edu/~matthias/html/ matthias.johnson_at_mankato.msus.edu finger matthias_at_krypton.mankato.msus.edu for pgp public key ======================================================================== Date: Tue, 10 Mar 1998 11:22:38 -0500 From: Carmelo Granja <C.Granja_at_med.mcgill.ca> Subject: Re: Student Users NT/VMS/DU Jon, We support Medical students computing requirements at McGill Faculty of Medicine. W/NT for students is now our standard platform. We migrated from Open VMS. The results are good. We still provide E-mail services from a central mail server. This server a DU 1000A will be used to serve both E-mail and Web facilities. The W/NT environment is still evolving. Most additional Computer Lab facilities are W/NT. Some Macs are also available. They integrate fairly well. We are presently proceeding to replace file servers, logon, printing services etc with W/NT server facilities. We still don't have much experience with the latter services being supported by W/NT, however, based on another department pilot project we do not expect great difficulties. An important issue is providing adequate training for the facilities to be properly utilized. We will need to address this issue with greater emphasis. Hope it helps, Regards, Carmelo Granja Manager, Medical Computing Resource McGill University, Faculty of Medicine ======================================================================== Date: Tue, 10 Mar 1998 15:46:25 -0500 (EST) From: Bryan Hodgson <bryanh_at_astea.com> Subject: Re: Student Users NT/VMS/DU NT is the apparent victor for small business tasks. Management loves it because the numbers look good. Our users much prefer the MS Exchange GUI for their mail (versus the old Word Perfect Office mailer on our Unix hosts). It ain't worth fighting over bring NT into the enterprise. It's going to arrive. You can't stop it. But NT has a long ways to go before it handles large numbers of users robustly, or has the type of manageability present on VMS and Unix. Give 'em the little stuff. When (if) NT gets better, give it the bigger stuff, too. My personal opinion is that by the time NT gets better, Unix is going to be considerably cheaper, and it will be a horse race all over again. VMS has got a lock in a lot of shops, but (sadly) I think it's going to get whittled away. Just another opinion. Oh .. we're a $70M software development house. Naturally, we go where our customers want to go. Guess where the little customers are going? The big ones aren't about to try running their business on NT (yet). ------------------------------------------------------------------ Bryan Hodgson Astea International Senior Systems Administrator 455 Business Center Drive email: bryanh_at_astea.com Horsham, PA 19044Received on Mon Mar 23 1998 - 22:42:06 NZST
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