🚀 go-pugleaf

I believe my company is being ripped off by a vendor that has sold us an imaging
system. We recently received a proposal from them that basically says we need t
o upgrade our front-end because Solaris 1.x is a deadend; they're recommending a

 new Solaris 2.4 solution. It is not this recommendation that has raised my ire
however. Here are some of the elements of their proposal:

1) 6 days development effort to upgrade their cold daemon. This daemon's job is
to continuously monitor the contents of a directory, and when it finds TIF image
s, it logs onto an image server (System V) and writes the image(s) to optical st
orage. The server returns a pointer, the daemon then logs onto a database server
and writes the pointer (along with other information contained in an asci text
file) to an Informix database (running on a System V). I do not think this is a
big deal, especially since we have a copy of this daemon running on a System V
fax server. The daemon does the same thing on the System V, except there is a
shell script that converts .fax files to .tif, and then the daemon processes
the TIFs (logs onto the image server, etc.). Of course the 6 days of dev effort
will cost us thousands of dollars.

2) 2 SPARCstations 1+. Aren't these obsolete? In any case the daemon has to run
on these SPARCs. And that's not all: 8 meg of RAM!!!? The proposal includes 
Kodak's capture subsystem software (which will run on each of the SPARCs). Each
SPARC will be attached to a Kodak 500 scanner. This is absurd ... I checked 
with Kodak and the 1+ has never been an approved machine; Kodak has only even
bothered to test their latest release on a SPARCstation 2 or 5 (and the 2 is
obsolete, too - isn't it?). As FYI, Kodak recommends 32 meg RAM.

This imaging firm has burned my company in the past. When I took over support
of the installed imaging system I found two SPARCstation 1+ machines. Running
with 16 meg of RAM! The machines were delivered in June 1994, but the manu-
facturer's stamp revealed they were built in July 1990. I guess they had them
in inventory and wanted to dump them on us.

Not only that, the only modification the vendor made to the kernel was the 
changes required by Kodak. It was a GENERIC kernel (with support for quotas,
etc., (all of the generic options), a gazillion defined devices, etc.

Needless to say the machines couldn't handle the processing load. The Kodak 
software would often puke, and the vendor said "you aren't tuning it".

Any comments would be appreciated (hey, I know they're rippoffs, BUT 6 days to
"port" their software ??? Sucker born every minute, huh?

Pete Fieschko