I would agree that AIX (and Solaris, probably HPUX) are still a little ahead of Linux for management, reliability, and server tools. I doubt very much that it is 10 years at this point. Well, maybe there are a few isolated tools (etc) that AIX had 10 years ago and Linux lacks now, but OTOH, Linux may have surpassed the Unix systems in some areas. When I supported servers across the country, hidden in closets in areas where people could barely spell "computer" and thought the box in the closet was just a modem connecting to a central office, the AIX machines were, in a way, the hardest to support, because they never failed, and so I had trouble remembering what to do when they did.
IMHO, Linux is more user friendly, more glitzy than the unixes, although lacking in back room, server support and troubleshooting tools. Sure, for almost everything that an AIX person could say "this is lacking in Linux", one could find a package for Linux that will do the same or similar function. However most of these would have to be manually installed, may have conflicts with other packages that have to be installed, and many of these are likely to be "release 0.4" and not up to the robustness of the supported mainframe Linuxes. A chain is only as strong as the weakest link. Let me give one example of glitz vs functionality. From within a shell script, I wanted to trace up my parent task tree in a shell script. This was something simple, I wanted to see if there was a scripting task running to record the session, so I could start one only if none was already running. In Solaris this was fairly simple. In Linux, a similar (though different) command, gave a beautiful multicolored display on a terminal, but would have been very difficult to parse to see if the script command was directly in my parent tree. Sure, if I was an excellent C programmer and had the time, I could have taken the source and added the functionality I needed, but I am not a C programmer. Aside: In mainframes, such as zVM, you can do a simple query to see if scripting is running, and if not, start it, and it will persist until stopped by another command. I don't recall the details, but thee were other places where a simple tool would do something in Solaris, but it was harder or impossible in Linux, or at least an inquiry on my local Linux list server could not help me find a solution. PS: Some previous comments seem to have been comparing servers on non mainframe hardware, or arguing against mainframe hardware. That is a separate question, which could lead to a whole new thread, but IMHO, as the number of server images grows, the manpower support effort/cost (and risk of failure or mistake) grows faster with discrete Intel servers than with mainframe hardware. For the person who is willing to pay (even if their concern is misplaced) to get 0.4 failures per 5000 server-years of operation instead of 0.7 failures per 5000 servers years, mainframes are still the way to go. And I am not saying the difference is that small, that was just an example. -- Carey Tyler Schug ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
