I'm laughing so hard I'm crying, but I'm so very sorry you have to deal with that. Honestly, NCR was, I think, worse to support than AIX. At least an appreciable amount of people once used AIX.
Fortunately, I discovered that if you don't tell it to "access a volume group" (it will just fail because it's unable to mount the filesystems r/w since it can't open the journal and leave you at a useless shell from which you cannot reboot, so instead you exit, and then it freezes, and unless you're a 65-year-old in a 22-year-old's body like me or you're one of the two bearded assholes that probably work at IBM that would think to mash ^\ in frustration, you won't ever get the kernel debugger that lets you restart the machine) and instead tell it to "run a maintenance shell" which is slightly less useless because you can then importvg and varyonvaginaoigsadlkignaldsk and *that* actually gives you mount, cat, and fsck (but little else) so that you can rewrite the stupid file and reset the stupid machine that costs four times as much as a PC and performs worse even after a day of tuning and have it work again so that you can decide you really don't give a fuck how well it runs as long as people can build shit on it.
HELL NO. NCR Unix is at least an identifiable branch of UNIX from distinguishable roots.
AIX is UNIX as written by Martians whose only original access to UNIX was via a sort of Google Translate interface that could only translate the error messages via Chinese.
I could manage to beat NCR UNIX thoroughly enough that I made packages that would install on both NCR UNIX and Solaris (mainly because the idiots who worked at Professional Services weren't smart enough to put the right CD into the servers before running pkgadd).
That was when I was working for NCR, mind, so I could of course be biased.
You know when you are searching for a damn manual, and the download site only has a pile of uselessly-named mystery PDF files, and then you pick one saying "Maybe this is the manual?" but inside is exactly two pages of useless graphics and splash and marketing drivel about how the product makes happy ponies and rainbows?
You just reminded me that I forgot to mention that IBM's documentation site was full of 404s for some stuff I was trying to look up related to the specific system we had.
I sort of wondered that myself. The whole damn thing is useless unless you can manage to mount your installation--and what if you can't because part of it is hosed? HURRR IBM DER DOY
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I'm laughing so hard I'm crying, but I'm so very sorry you have to deal with that. Honestly, NCR was, I think, worse to support than AIX. At least an appreciable amount of people once used AIX.
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AIX is UNIX as written by Martians whose only original access to UNIX was via a sort of Google Translate interface that could only translate the error messages via Chinese.
I could manage to beat NCR UNIX thoroughly enough that I made packages that would install on both NCR UNIX and Solaris (mainly because the idiots who worked at Professional Services weren't smart enough to put the right CD into the servers before running pkgadd).
That was when I was working for NCR, mind, so I could of course be biased.
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You just wrote the opposite. :)
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What a monumentally hateful piece of equipment.
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Harsh, man.
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