| What I like about SCO |
Oct. 30, 2006
I know I've written many columns blasting the current management's habit of suing Linux-related companies. But, there's one thing I like about SCO -- whether we're talking about the Santa Cruz Operation founded by Doug Michels and family/friends, or about the modern-day SCO Group -- that annoys Linux lovers everywhere:
In OpenServer, they make one great Unix operating system.
I was reminded of this by a recent ComputerWorld story about a network that had a ghost server.
One day, out of the blue, they started having erratic, very erratic, network problems. So, they did all the usual things and they came up with... nothing. No worm, no virus, no hackers, no faulty wiring, no bum equipment, nada.
So, out of desperation, they went pinging their way through their network trying to find anything that was there, which didn't belong there. This time they found nothing. After pouring over the network topology and logs, they found the general area where... something was on the network.
After digging around the office, they found in a closet filled with spare parts, an old SCO server, which had been working away for years without anyone even knowing it was there. Every now and then, it did run into a problem and it sent out a LAM (Look-At-ME!) error message that collided with other server message block transmissions.
The point of this story, besides Know Your Network, is that this is typical of SCO OpenServer.
I, myself, know of a case of a car dealership where the corporate ownership decided to bring in a new inventory system. According to HQ's records, this dealership didn't have a local server for their system.
When the IT people got there, though, they found that the employees had been using a system for years. No one could recall seeing it, and it certainly had long ago disappeared from the corporate IT records, but something was still tracking cars on their VT-102 terminals.
That something turned out to be, yet again, an old SCO server. This one had been walled up during a renovation of the show floor and as people came and went, no one was left who knew that it was still there.
Any experienced SCO reseller can tell you the same kind of stories. In fact, in a way, the near-absolute and complete reliability of OpenServer is a real problem for SCO. When something doesn't break, people don't fix it, and that makes it harder for SCO to sell the newer versions of OpenServer.
I don't know about you, but I love products that can take a beating and keep on ticking. When it comes to computer software and operating systems, that kind of reliability is almost unheard of.
I can keep my Linux systems running along for years -- I have a SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 I've kept up for three years now. But, I do have to manage it. The fact that OpenServer can run for year after year without any attention at all... well I have to take my hat off to it.
Oh, make no doubt about it, I prefer Linux for many other reasons. That said, when it comes to reliability, all other operating systems, including Linux, still have some things to learn from SCO OpenServer.
-- Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
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