Re: linux vs AS/400

I'm going *way* out onto a limb with this answer and what I say is even
less of IBM's voice than usual. Just forget what the return address says
and pretend it came from <hellsop@execpc.com>.

Roy writes:

> How does a unix machine compare to an AS/400 as far as mission critical
> work?  Price performance ratio?  A friend of mine works on a nightmare NT
> server for a large company and they have lots of trouble.  He wishes he had
> a unix server for reliability.  So how does unix compare to the AS/400?

"It depends."

My own opinion is that it's pretty hard to get an AS/400 to fall over. NT
generally won't die unless something wrong happens (though it may be hard
to tell beforehand what NT will consider wrong). Win95, well... I've said
things like "Win95 thinks 'Oh, jeeze. He moved the mouse. Now what?'" and
not gotten much except wry grins. linux doesn't fit into the spread very
well at all because linux varies so much implementation to implementation.
(Generally, linux doesn't get installed or loaded, so much as it gets built
on the fly for your machine and you get to drive it while it does it.) If
the system is built by someone that knows what they're doing, on good and
fairly standard hardware, using shipping builds and well-tested software,
for routine useful tasks that unix has been doing for a long time (like
mail serving, news serving, DNS, lpd, web hosting, etc.), then you will
probably see uptimes measured in months and may well go years without any
user-affecting downtime. Let Joe N. T. Admin slap the beta CD in a machine
and try running some cutting edge stuff on it, and you'll long for the
simple stability of that 95 box.

It's not news to anyone here that doing things carefully pays off in the
long run, but with unix, that effect is even more powerful than on the 400.
It's pretty easy to write well-behaved applications for OS/400, and harder
in unix because there's more things that can happen wrong when something
isn't done correctly.

Peter H. Coffin
T/L 665-6298 (414)223-6298
phcoffin@us.ibm.com
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