Date: Sat, 23 Nov 96 16:34:20 From: "Jake Hamby" <jehamby@lightside.com> To: chat@freebsd.org Subject: In Hollywood, nothing is as it seems Message-ID: <199611240036.QAA05973@covina.lightside.com>
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True story: I was referred to by a coworker that a North Hollywood security company was looking for a sysadmin to diagnose some trouble they'd been having with their SCO UNIX box. So we drove over to this place, which was hidden in a cul-de-sec next to some old warehouses. It had a 9-ft high black wall around the perimeter and a high-tech looking keypad. The guy who referred me (who had decided to tag along for moral support) pushed the keypad and introduced us. A woman opened the door and let us through the gate, behind which was a seemingly ordinary looking house that had been converted to office space. She walked up to the front, past the ordinary looking white front door, and up to a wall covered with shelves and some old paint cans. She pushed it open; it was the door to the house! All the paint cans were conveniently glued together and the whole thing swung open on hinges. The "real" door was a fake, cleverly mounted to an outside wall. We were trying to play it cool, but afterwards we both said, "Man, I want one of those on my house!" :-) The moral of the story is the subject of this post. As for the SCO (OpenServer 5) box, it was really screwy. Thank God I don't have to work on SCO systems in my day job! The system had four modems attached through a Digi port server, and would occasionally pause for seconds (sometimes minutes) at a time, for no apparent reason. Also, it couldn't seem to connect at faster than 9600 bps (the gettydefs was set to 38400 bps but would immediately drop down to 9600). Connecting the modem directly to the PC, rather than through the Digi, didn't fix the problem, so it had to be the SCO OS itself. Apparently they've had this problem for five _years_, even with a previous computer and version of the OS. I suggested they upgrade to Solaris/x86, which would perform much better (the thing was a Pentium 166, but *felt* like a 386, an observation shared by other people on this list in the "Free SCO" thread), and offer 100% binary compatibility with their old SCO binaries. I would like to suggest FreeBSD, but I doubt that our SCO compatibility is that robust (nor is Linux's) to run such wonderful programs as Microsoft Word, Foxpro, and Wordperfect for SCO. :-) At any rate, they accepted, guaranteeing me a hefty consulting fee for a day's work of upgrading to an OS I know how to deal with. But just out of curiosity, does anyone on this list know what might have been causing their SCO dial-in terminal woes in the first place? -- Jake
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