Re: SCO 5.0.4/5 stops at boot: prompt on a fresh install in a VMware workstation

Bela Lubkin wrote:
Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:

Bela Lubkin wrote:
Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:

What happens if you just *wait* for a few minutes? Under 5.0.6,
there's a lengthy pause at that stage: I think that it's a legacy of
what is basically a very antique operating system that thinks you
should reboot only in emergencies, and threefore you *MUST* want a
lengthy chance to have a talk with it at boot time.
Wow, that's an interesting interpretation.

It's a server OS. It should, in fact, only be rebooted in extraordinary
circumstances. It is not a version of Windows where the first "cure"
for any glitch is a drive-by rebooting. This has nothing to do with
antiquity.
I don't use "rock-stable" OS's as servers, because they turn out not to be. Lightweight, userland redundancy and duplication of servers is usually more reliable and gives flexibility for changing needs.

Hmmm, I believe this is called "Sweet Lemons". Yes, you can build
something more or less reliable out of sufficiently redundant unreliable
parts, if that's how you want to work.

I've built Beowulf clusters this way, and helped deploy thousands of machines worldwide. It's a viable strategy.

And the SCO OpenServer 5.0.6 systems are far, far more likely to need rebooting than the other systems I deal with. The tendency of cpio tape backups to hang the tape drive and require a reboot is *nasty*. I haven't seen anything that bad in the server world in decades.

Use a different type of tape drive, different HBA, cabling, or
whatever's causing the issue. Or use a different backup strategy.
Certainly don't just live with the problem...

Right. That's why I'm using a Linux box to take rsnapshot backups and run the tapedrive. If I need more sophisticated tape management, or a tape library, or encrypted backup. I'll use Amanda software on top of it. The rsnapshot can run over a secure SSH tunnel, the rsnapshot server can serve NFS, SMB, or SSH tunneled rsync back to the SCO system, and it's all freeware. It takes some work to set up and configure, but that's true of anything. And the snapshot capability approaches that of a NetApp storage array.

Rebooting takes a while. Have you ever worked with a machine whose BIOS
takes 3-4 minutes to initialize, but which gives you only a few seconds
to tell it to go into BIOS setup? Pretty darn annoying, isn't it?
You have to power cycle it, then watch carefully for several minutes,
waiting to catch those crucial few seconds. The opportunity to get your
Unix system into single-user mode is much like the opportunity to get a
machine into BIOS setup. It is reasonable for it to delay a bit so you
have a chance to catch it.
I agree with the BIOS problem. It's aggravated with SCSI devices. Amazingly, it's eased by Linux BIOS's, which can be configured and don't spend ages scanning for non-existent and deprecated hardware: the OLPC project uses them.

A delay is quite reasonable, I agree. But an additional line of text saying 'will boot in 60 seconds' wouldn't kill anyone to have written into the boot loader.

Yeah, that's a long time deficiency of the OSR5 boot program.

Bela<
.

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