Moving from SCO to Linux

[Jay R. Ashworth]

On Fri, Jul 23, 2004 at 09:51:52AM -0500, Jeremy Anderson wrote:
> Well, one has to stay on top of security updates with _any_ OS.
> Regardless of that, I'm curious as to what you mean by "very slightly
> quirky". Quirky as in "Hrm, that's odd, that line printer was
> processing jobs fine just five minutes ago", or quirky as in "Hrm,
> that's interesting, I could've sworn there used to be a machine room
> there, instead of a mushroom cloud..." ?

I don't think we'd call *that* quirky.  :-)

> Those are most definitely in the proper order, too. Does SCO run and
> run and run? Absolutely. Will a properly configured Linux box do
> the same? Ja, unless the software thereon is buggy (for everyone's
> benefit, please do not ask me about my experiences with ensim).
> AIX is, in my experience, far more robust than SCO, but I'm not
> considering it for this application because it's overkill.

AIX had *better* be more bullet proof.  From what I've been told by
IBMers, it's basically a POSIX skin over VM/MVS.

> My major concern is migrating the filepro product itself. Basically,
> will I be able to move the directory structure over, and crank up the
> Linux version? Or is there lots of file masssaging that has to be done
> (outside the normal ownership/perm issues)?

Naw; we migrate people all the time.  Filepro, qua filepro, moved just
fine.  Your non-filepro menu program might give you trouble, if you have
one; you have to be careful about scripting called *from* filepro menus
(or .profiles), and you need to check for SYSTEM calls in your code.

But otherwise?  Just pay a rediculous amount for your new runtime, pray
that you can sell someone your old one (cause, last time *I* had a
client in this situation, they weren't doing trade-ins :-), and go.

FWIW, you might be able to port a SCO runtime to Linux; fp% seems to
run ok in the version of Linux-abi shipped with (but not enabled by
default in) SuSE Pro 9.0.

One possible problem: you need to make sure you build your users in teh
password file with the same UID numbers as on SCO, or your @CD's will
break. 

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
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