UX400S: a decent machine

["Donald H. Mitchell" <dmitchell%backus.trc.amoco.com@RELAY.CS.NET>]

    Date: Thu, 18 Jan 90 09:24 PST
    From: Mr. Spock <Spock@SAMSON.cadr.dialnet.symbolics.com>

	Date: Tue, 16 Jan 90 14:01 CST
	From: dmitchell@backus.trc.amoco.com (Donald H. Mitchell)

	Some of the initial tie-ups were Sun host compatibility.  Sure,
	Symbolics chose the weird path of only authorizing file servers as
	hosts.  But I have mine working well in a 4/110.

    This all sounds very good.  How's your Sun configured?  And, what's the
    price tag all together (i.e. Sun + UX400S = ?)?

Sun 4/110, 16 MBytes memory (although since the Ivory does not use its
host's memory, I think this is irrelevant), 300 MByte SCSI drive.  I
don't remember all the prices.  I did not buy the Sun to act as the
Symbolics host but to use as a Sun.  I think the Sun is about $15K, the
drive is whatever drives cost, and the Symbolics about $20K.
Non-educational rates.

I have verified that for day-to-day tasks, you do not need a local tape
(will use any accessible Unix host's through remote exec calls);
however, you MAY need a local tape to get the thing initially set up
(including re-setting it up if the local drive fails).  I don't know.
There is also some evidence that you may not need the local disk, or, at
least, that you could use a substantially smaller disk (and page over
the network).

You DO, however, need some accessible host with disk space :-)

	Many products come built in: NFS, TCP/IP, and X.  These all work
	substantially better than their counterparts in 7.2.
	
    Now this is encouraging.  I've been more than mildly disappointed with X
    in 7.2.

Yes, X is very good.  I haven't had any problems.  Remember, the
Symbolics does not own its own terminal and must use X (for this reason,
the Symbolics cannot be the X side that displays?).

One of my minor beefs about NFS and TCP/IP is that the Symbolics can't
read or request the info from a Unix nameserver but has to have a
Symbolics style namespace available.  Of course, I may have missed
something.

    Thanks for speaking up.
      --Mark Alexander