[TUHS] A/UX [was Linux is on-topic]

Dave Horsfall dave at horsfall.org
Thu Aug 13 10:00:09 AEST 2020


On Fri, 31 Jul 2020, Larry McVoy wrote:

> On Fri, Jul 31, 2020 at 07:12:57PM -0400, Richard Salz wrote:
>>> SMIT was quite nice [ context seemingly removed ]
>>
>> i have never seen those four words together like that before.
>
> Me neither.  SMIT was HORRIBLE if you understood the files in /etc and 
> knew what to do with them.  It might be nice if you had no understanding 
> of how to admin a Unix system and here is this "nice" curses based way 
> to do admin.

SMIT was one just one of the systems that I had to sysadmin (along with 
Open/Xenix (hah!), Slowaris, PH-UX (as we called it), etc; I narrowly 
avoided Windoze, along with denying all knowledge of COBOL.

> To anyone remotely competent, and I don't mean edit sendmail.cf, I mean 
> you can edit inetd.conf, you can edit a crontab file, etc, SMIT was a 
> nightmare that made something that should be vi $FILE, done 20 seconds 
> later, a hellish journey through their menus.  It was AWFUL.

Quite, because I liked the way that SMIT showed you the obtuse command 
that was being executed, so you could run it yourself with modifications.

> Ask me how I know.

Ditto...

-- Dave


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