UNIX
UNIX is a command line operating system
written in the C programming language.
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UNIX has been around for
almost 30 years. That maturity
brings a stable, mature high-end
operating system available for
servers and supercomputers
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UNIX was conceived in the early 1970s by
AT&T employees as an operating environment
to provide services to software developers who
were discouraged by the incompatibility of new
computers and the lack of development tools for
application development.
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After AT&T was forced to abandon
commercial computing as part of an
antitrust settlement, AT&T’s UNIX was
made available for free to the academic
community.
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Because UNIX had been designed in a way
that made it easy to “port” (move) to new
hardware, colleges and universities that
switched to UNIX were able to run a single
operating system on all of their computers,
even if their computers came from multiple
manufacturers.
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Programmers at the University of
California at Berkeley made significant
modifications to the original source code
and called it BSD (Berkeley Software
Distribution) UNIX.
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They sent this new version of the UNIX
environment to other programmers around the
country, who then added tools and code as they
saw fit. Possibly the most important advance
made to the software by the programmers at
Berkeley was the addition of networking
software which allowed the operating system to
function in a local area network (LAN).
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Sun Microsystems original version of
UNIX, the Sun operating system was based
on BSD UNIX Version 4.2. At that time,
AT&T’s version of the UNIX environment
was known as System V. In 1988, Sun
OS/BSD, AT&T System 3, and XENIX were
combined into what became System V
Release 4 (SVR4).
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This new generation of the operating
system was an effort to combine the best
features of both BSD and AT&T UNIX
and create a kind of industry standard for
the operating system.
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This enabled software to be developed
for UNIX without concern as to whether
it was System V or BSD 4.2. The new
SVR4 became the basis for not only Sun
and AT&T versions of the UNIX
environment, but also IBM’s AIX, and
Hewlett-Packard’s HP-UX.
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One of the things that UNIX systems
are famous for is the interoperability
they offer based on what some people
have called the universal technical
standards and protocols.
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UNIX is particularly desirable as a
server platform for client/server
computing because of the large range of
platform sizes available and the huge base
of application and development software
available.
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Eventually UNIX spread into the business
community, and pushed aside almost all
proprietary mainframe and minicomputer
operating systems.
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Even IBM and DEC ended up
offering their own versions of
UNIX as well as their proprietary
operating systems.
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UNIX people are pretty fanatical
when it comes to support of their
favorite operating system, and there
is pretty much only one way of
doing things—their way or the
highway.
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The UNIX file system (UFS) controls the way
that information in files and directories is stored on
disk and other forms of secondary storage. It
controls which users can access what items and
how. The file system is therefore one of the most
basic tools for enforcing UNIX security on your
system.
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A shell is an interface between the user
and the kernel. It acts as an interpreter or
translator. In other words, the shell
accepts commands issued by you,
interprets these commands, and executes
the appropriate programs.
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Three shells are available in
the typical UNIX environment:
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1) Bourne shell ($) – The default shell for
the typical UNIX computing environment.
The Bourne shell was developed for the
AT&T System V.2 UNIX environment. It
is typically used by system administrators.
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2) Korn shell ($) – A superset of the
Bourne shell. It has many of the Bourne
shell features plus added features. This is
the industry standard for normal system
users.
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3) C shell (%) – A shell based on the C
programming language. Like the Korn shell,
it has additional features such as aliasing and
history. C shell was developed by Sun’s Bill
Joy for programmers, but is used with
increasing frequency by normal system
users.
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Following are some of the
networking advantages that
UNIX Servers offer:
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Telnet
Administrators can Telnet into a remote host to
perform routine administrative tasks. The
administrator does not have to be sitting in front of
the computer that requires the attention. This is
also a cost savings, because a UNIX machine can
be operated headless, without a keyboard or a
monitor.
UNIX
Performance
UNIX provides faster read/write operations than
other operating systems. UNIX computers tend
to operate for months or years without the need
of a reboot. Crashes are rare. The number of
reboots forced by configuration changes are
minimal in a UNIX environment.
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Hardware
Because the hardware has a longer life in the UNIX
world, more drivers tend to be available and the
network cards and other peripherals can be used for
a longer period of time. This minimizes the
investment in hardware upgrades.
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Automating Processes
UNIX/Linux administrators are able to
automate many of the processes of the
operating system and of the applications by
making use of shell scripting. A shell script is
a program that the administrator can write to
automate certain administrative tasks.
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Scalability
Mainstream UNIX systems can take
advantage of multiple motherboards that
can handle from 2 to over 100 processors.
High availability of these systems makes
for almost 100% uptime.
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Sun Microsystems was the first
company to use a windowing environment
in conjunction with the UNIX operating
system. In 1993, a consortium of UNIX
platform vendors was formed to develop
an integrated, standard, and consistent
graphical user interface desktop
environment.
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Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Novell, and Sun
Microsystems, along with many other
companies and members of the OSF (Open
Software Foundation), X/Open, and the X
Consortium all came together to develop
the Common Desktop Environment or
CDE.
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The Common Desktop Environment (CDE):
Is a graphical user interface (GUI) between the user and the
operating system
Provides built-in menus for users to select and run utilities
and programs without using Solaris 7 environment commands
Enables users to control multiple documents or applications
on the screen at the same time
Controls activities in windows using both the mouse and
the keyboard
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The Common Desktop Environment (CDE)
is part of the Common Operating System
Environment (COSE, pronounced "cozy")
agreement, one of many attempts at unifying
the UNIX market. Although COSE itself never
took off, CDE has achieved some success--
most notably, all the major UNIX vendors
agreeing on the Motif interface as the basis for
the Common Desktop Environment.
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Despite its numerous advantages as a
desktop and server operating system,
UNIX never has been widely accepted
in the general corporate world that
favors DOS/Windows and Novell's
NetWare. A key drawback to UNIX in
the corporate arena has been the lack of
a single UNIX standard.
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Although Windows dominates the
corporate desktop, UNIX is still widely
used as a server platform due to its strong
performance and robust features.
Business-critical servers must be able to
deliver high-end features and run the
company's transaction-based applications.
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UNIX has a well established position as the
operating system of choice for distributed
relational databases from vendors like Informix,
Ingres, Oracle, and Sybase. Most of these
vendors, however, will port their products to
Windows NT as well. Any effort to reduce the
problems associated with the multiple UNIX
variants will do much to bolster the stature of
UNIX as a worthwhile alternative to Windows
NT.
