SUMMARY: CA Products on Solaris 8

Thanks to the respondents:

Paul Robertson
Kwan, William
elizabeth.lee
David Foster
Justin Stringfellow


It is as I feared.  CA is basically crap.

Comments varied from a former CA developer claiming
that the product was a hodge podge of
"old, crappy stuff from  various companies", to
Admins just outright getting rid of CA:
"After several weeks, we decided to toss Access Control into the garbage.
Soon afterwards, the CA sales rep called and suggested that the problem
was somehow due to our inexperience with the product, and that we should
hire their professional services group to figure it out. It was clearly
a bug, their technical support people admitted it was a bug, and they
wanted us to pay for professional services(!). Needless to say, we were
happily rid of the product and did not take the sales rep up on his
offer."

May you have a choice and not be forced to run CA products.

CA products do not play well together.
In particular, CA insists that separate products that
they sell be installed into one directory tree. (/opt/ca)
This is a big no-no from a sysadmin standpoint because
it makes future upgrades or removals very difficult.
They write to many system files such as /etc/name_to_sysnum
and /etc/profile.

Their ENF (event notification facility) was recently
changed from a statically loaded module to a dynamically
loaded kernel module, and now it causes some systems to
hang upon bootup, other times there are failures in the
modload, which causes the system to behave very improperly
(can't kill processes, runing prtconf would hang, etc),
and to top it all off causes random and frequent panics
to the system.

I could go on and on.....
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