Comment by TheRealDunkirk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TheRealDunkirk | Hacker News Reader

In the 90's, I did some FEA, and wound up getting asked to be a formal sysadmin for all the Unix workstations doing this kind of work in the company. I cleaned up our sprawling mess by installing a central server, making a NIS workgroup, and hosting home directories, and versioned folders for binaries. In the process, I wound up dealing with all of these machines. I have a fondness for all the OS's, for different reasons. I found HP-UX to be the least intrusive, IRIX to be the prettiest, Solaris to be the most well-supported (with the shareware site I forget the name of), and AIX to be the most sysop friendly (with their TUI admin tool that would explain the commands it was running). I've looked at buying old machines on Ebay, but apparently a lot of other people are waxing nostalgic about them too, and the prices reflect this.

In the 90's I worked at some pretty large heterogeneous Unix shops. We had Solaris, HP-UX, DEC Unix, IRIX, and some others. It was a sprawling mess of NFS mounts and NIS authentication ("ypcat passwd", anyone?) I agree with most of what you said, though I preferred Solaris. IRIX on the desktop was pretty fun though! My next job was a pretty big AIX shop. AIX "felt weird", unless you used "smit", which was the TUI you're probably referring to.

In my retro Unix collection, I have a Sparc, Alpha, IRIX, and NeXT box, but they're not all in working order.

Thankfully these days there's emulation to help soften the blow - it's not the same as the physical workstation, but at least it's easier on the wallet.

As for the shareware site, was it perhaps Sunsite or Metalab?

Sunsite! Yes! That was it!

I worked in several mixed-Unix shops, and juggling all the GUI/TUI sysadmin tools (SAM, SMIT, Solstice, etc.) and desktop environments was actually fun in a challenging way. Inspired shell scripting, NFS, NIS, and eventually CDE helped keep the flock somewhat in harmony. It was a zoo, but a manageable one as long as the limitations of each flavour were taken into account.

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