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11.16.07
SCO Bumbles Along
 By
A.P. Lawrence
I now, I know: don't kick a man when he's down. Poor SCO doesn't have much time left on this earth, and here I am complaining about their stuff.. oh
well, I'm a horrible person and that's just the way it is.
A retail sales customer has a SCO 5.0.7 system that I maintain for them. Someone else does the POS app; I just do the silly SCO stuff. Anyway, the POS guy needed Samba for smething he wants to do, and it wasn't installed, so I went in to do that. Oh such joy: I really, really like putting up an ancient version of Samba on an oldish SCO box. Talk about gilding the lily..
So I ftp'd out to Skunkware (that probably won't last too much longer so why bother to href it and why would you want to go there anyway?) and downloaded the "latest" Samba. That would be Samba 3.0.14.. yeah.., well, I guess it could be worse.
Of course that wouldn't run on 5.0.7 MP3, I needed to also download SCO's MP5 patch, which at the moment is the latest and greatest patch available. Super patch, 265332 KB worth.. pretty much an entire OS replacement from the size of it and how long it took to install. And of course with so much replaced, it needed a reboot, which a retail store doesn't want to do mid day, so I left instructions that they needed to reboot the next morning and that I could finish up Samba by way of ssh.
Silly me.
Next morning I tried sshing in and found I could not. Oh well, probably that super patch broke something.. big deal, they'll reboot and it should be fine. I sent off an email to the customer asking if they had rebooted and got back an answer that said no, they hadn't, because the backup failed and the Guy In Charge would not reboot if he didn't have a good backup.. okey-dokey, I said, but if you don't reboot you probably never will have a good backup because I bet MP5 broke that too..
So a few more days went by, and Guy In Charge asked POS guy why the Samba thingy wasn't working, and he asked me, and I told him, and he asked if I'd go back on-site and "fix it". Sigh.. OK. So I did that, and sure enough confirmed that the backup was broken, and of course Samba wasn't going to work, and I was explaining this to Guy Not Quite In Charge, and he said "So? Reboot it - there's almost no one in the store right now, big deal". So we got everyone off and I did a quick reboot - total downtime probably four minutes at most.. but it was enough to get Guy In Charge to come flying into the room madder than a hornet because he Did Not Want the System Shut Down During the Day. Got that? Yessiree, I certainly did.. mutter, mutter..
Continue reading this article.
About the Author:
A.P. Lawrence provides SCO Unix and Linux consulting services http://www.pcunix.com
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