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From: jnemeth@cue.bc.ca (John Nemeth)
Subject: Re: How to get BSD for DEC VAXStation 3100?
Message-ID: <1993Mar15.083145.4179@softwords.bc.ca>
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Organization: Computer Using Educators of B.C., Canada
References: <1ngeuhINNkd2@senator-bedfellow.MIT.EDU> <C3noMG.6yG@panix.com> <VIXIE.93Mar10120202@cognition.pa.dec.com>
Date: Mon, 15 Mar 93 08:31:45 GMT
Lines: 45
In article <VIXIE.93Mar10120202@cognition.pa.dec.com> vixie@pa.dec.com (Paul A Vixie) writes:
>Ooops. Not quite:
>
>[Thor Lancelot Simon]
>> WRL also did this. I think I remember Paul Vixie saying it took "a few
>> weeks". God only knows who's allowed to distribute what to whom; if DEC
>> had half a decent set of brains settled anywhere in their executive levels
>> they'd donate what's needed to CSRG (is it the memory management that's
>> different? That's what I remember hearing, but I'm not sure...) and
>> generate enormous goodwill among their customers who might be stuck with
>> old VAXstations they can't use, while sacrificing a few sales of an
>> operating system that nobody much cares about anyway, and which can't be
>> generating much revenue for DEC at this point, after all. >
>
>4.4bsd was on my list of things to port before I left DECWRL, but I don't
>think it's going to happen. 4.3-Reno supports the VAX and the VAX3100 is
>not hard to add (several device drivers are the same as on a VAX2000) but
>4.3-Reno isn't available without a V32 source license and it doesn't have
>nice things like mmap() in any case.
>
>I pretty much think VAX BSD is a dead issue unless I take some hardware
>home with me when I leave (which, for those who havn't heard, will be June
>4 of this year).
I'm running a MicroVAX 2000 running ULTRIX 3.0(32 user licence)
(we don't have the funds to upgrade). I'm constantly having problems
caused by using an old version of the OS (i.e. old C compiler, old
libraries, commands that don't have the newer options, sendmail that
doesn't do MX records, etc.). I have replaced various system
programs, like sendmail, and various library routines using code from
Net-2. There is no way we can justify the cost of upgrading ULTRIX (a
friend said he paid $10,000, to go from 4.1 to 4.2 (32 user licence);
we could buy a whole new machine for that much (we qualify for
educational discounts)). I would very much like to see BSD4.4 (not
the lite version) for the VAX. It would solve a lot of my problems,
and I've talked to others on the network that are in the same boat. I
don't care about binary compatibility, as I only run two programs
which are not PD, and I have source for both. One of them actually
came with VAX BSD binaries, which sort of work with ULTRIX (some
system calls differ, so I had to recompile it anyways), but I'm
dumping it sometime this month anyways.
--
John Nemeth jnemeth@cue.bc.ca
System Administrator
Computer Using Educators of B.C.