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12.11.07
Another
SCO Unix Filepro System Bites The Dust
 By
A.P. Lawrence
I spent most of yesterday on the phone helping another consultant port a SCO Unix Filepro system over to Linux.
Actually, we had started this more than a month back but ran into a Filepro snag: she had done all her menus using a product called Softa, apparently no longer in business, so although we did an initial transfer then, she had to re-write some menus before we could bring it live.
The Linux was SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10, which caused me more than a little confusion because I had it firmly in my mind that it was RedHat ES and kept looking for RedHat utilities that of course were not there.
I transferred data by FTP, including user home directories, and used my script at http://aplawrence.com/SCOFAQ/FAQ_scotec1ilinuxpass.html to bring over password info. At that point we were technically "working", but some problems remained.
The first was that I had installed Microlite Edge and had tested it previously, but now it was failing with a library error. And although Filepro was still happily working, the consultant "on the ground" told me she no longer had a GUI screen. I tried restarting xdm and saw that it too was failing complaining about libraries. Huh? Well, there apparently had been an automatic system update since I had installed Microlite, maybe it just needed a reboot? Nope, that did not help. Crossing my fingers and wishing heavily, I ran "ldconfig" and bingo, everything started working again.. I rebooted once more just to eliminate any remaining issues and all was fine.
The next issue was printers. On the SCO system we had one parallel printer, one serial, and several Windows printers handled through Visionfs (a Samba-like product that SCO used). The parallel was no problem, but the consultant physically on site insisted there was no serial port on the new machine. I insisted that couldn't be true, because I could see it in /proc/ioports, and frankly, given that it was a new Dell, I was surprised to find parallel, but surely there had to be serial. No, she insisted again. OK, we'll move on and come back to that: let's set up the Windows printers
I had her switch to the GUI on ALT-F7 and look for the System Menu. She couldn't find it. I assumed that the monitor must be out of adjustment and tried leading her through manually adjusting it - that didn't seem to help, but eventually she did find the right menu. I probably wasn't helping as I still had RedHat firmly in my head, but anyway, there we were and I led her through adding the first Windows printer - I had already done the parallel at the command line with "lpadmin".
The printer did not work. It timed out trying to reach the host, and eventually disabled itself. As the host was ready and waiting, and still printing from SCO, that seemed odd. More than odd, because if there was any odd little network issue, you certainly wouldn't expect SCO Visionfs to work where Samba doesn't.
I don't like to print through Samba anyway; I'd rather have print servers, but I dug in and immediately got into oh-so-weird land. The first thing I did was restart Samba, and ta-da, the printer worked. Once, and then it timed out again. I added another printer at the command line and that worked three or four times and then also timed ot. What the heck?
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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