[760] in Release_7.7_team
I attended an Interesting SGI demo.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Cattey)
Thu Oct 24 00:22:32 1996
Date: Thu, 24 Oct 1996 00:25:50 -0400 (EDT)
From: Bill Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
To: saurons@MIT.EDU, vkumar@MIT.EDU
Cc: release-team@MIT.EDU
This afternoon I called our SGI salesman to complain about how the new
shape to the latest SGI box couldn't possibly be deployed in our
clusters.
He invited me to a dog and pony show happening to be held this evening
at the Science Museum.
I was too busy chewing through SGI salesmen and technical folks to
bother to each much of the buffet fare.
I didn't like their live show.
But then I started meeting people who could help us!
I explained to sundry folks how I was sure that SGI really did have neat
stuff, but that my experience was of the guy who takes the heat when
things didn't work, and how I wanted us to work on making things work
smoothly.
I met one of the primary folks on the SGI O^2 project who calmly
informed me (as 5 others had not been able to because they didn't know
the product in such depth) that the new box, although it is really easy
to take apart, comes with a metal locking bar that can be used to secure
the system.
John Coukos re-emphasized his desire for us to receive one of the
machines to work with and test.
Andy Shein clued me in on how Transarc is up to speed on IRIX 6.2, but
has not yet received enough on 6.3, but that they're interested in
making that happen.
I also chatted with a Mark Smith who promises to help us understand the
install system better and maybe to work through making some of the
things interoperate better with AFS. (I think he found Sun's hack for
the ln system call interesting.)
So, yes, as this note reads, so went my evening: I started off very
worried and quite negative, but ended the evening on a positive note,
with new people for us to talk to and work with.
Both SGI and we will have to work hard at some of these issues, but I
feel hope again that we can eventually evolve our SGI rituals to be as
streamlined as those for Sun. (Wouldn't it be nice to just take the
Install CD's and feed them directly to AFS instead of hand-tooling
golden disk images on a master machine?)
I'm exhausted.
-wdc
P.S. They did show us the Omni Film "Special Effects" which was quite good.
