Handling mixed environments

It's increasingly common to find a combination of different architectures in use by the same engineering team, on the same network.¹ It's expected that this trend will continue and become more prominent as the various hardware vendors strive to commoditize their wares and compete for market share. Although this is generally considered to be a good trend, it does present a few points worth noting.

Heterogeneous environments

If you have a mixed environment, where UNIX stations of different architectures coexist on the same net, then we'll assume that you currently have mechanisms and procedures for handling the coordination of the various binaries. We'll leave the complexity of this issue to your local sys-admin team, but you might take a look at the file $RAZOR_HOME/examples/rz_prep.smart and $RAZOR_HOME/examples/rz_prep.sh.smart for suggestions.

When you purchase Razor, you are entitled to all the binaries for all of our supported platforms, free of charge.² Our pricing and licensing system is only concerned with how many simultaneous users there are on your net. This is independent of which architecture they are presently invoking the tool from.

All of the Razor programs can communicate freely with executables for each of our supported platforms. You can have the license server running on architecture X, a database server running on architecture Y, and a client program running on architecture Z. Please refer to the "PC Client Application" appendix on page 293 and "Remote UNIX Client Applications" appendix on page 301 for implications and considerations of these heterogeneous environments.

OpenLook vs. Motif (Sun only)

You can run the Motif form of Razor on an OpenLook window manager (olwm). The window manager provides the decorations which surround the displays, but within the Razor windows, it will be a Motif interface.

X terminals, etc.

There are very few considerations when running Razor's GUI's from X terminals (or PCs/MACs acting as X terminals). The two most common concerns relate to the fact that X terminals do not have the same physical resources as a UNIX workstation.

If you are running the PC client application, please refer to the "PC Client Application" appendix on page 293.

Not enough memory

For X-terminals with limited memory, some of the Razor interfaces may have difficulty starting. In these situations, we recommend restricting the vertical and/or horizontal size of the display via the following X resources:

Issues*maxWidth:    nnn
Threads*maxWidth:   nnn
Versions*maxWidth:  nnn
Issues*maxHeight:   nnn
Threads*maxHeight:  nnn
Versions*maxHeight: nnn

Where in each of the above cases, "nnn" is the maximum size in pixels that you will need to display the main program. These resources control and limit the amount of memory required to handle the display.

Not enough color

On monochrome displays our default color selection may result in an all black or all white presentation. To correct this, simply set the following X resources:

Issues*background:   white
Issues*foreground:   black
Versions*background: white
Versions*foreground: black
Threads*background:  white
Threads*foreground:  black

PC Clients

The Razor applications issues, versions, and threads are available as client applications targeting Win95/NT platforms. These applications operate in a true client/server fashion. Since they are true clients there is no requirement to mount database directories. However, since clients require a server, Razor must be installed on a UNIX or Windows NT platform which is network accessible by the PC.

All databases are maintained on the server machine. Platform-specific text file format differences are handled automatically by Razor and are, therefore transparent to end users. For example, a text file introduced from versions/UNIX and subsequently checked out by versions/PC will be placed on the PC in PC text format. The same file checked out by versions/UNIX will be placed on the UNIX machine in UNIX text format.

For installation and general instructions regarding the Razor PC clients refer to the "PC Client Application" appendix on page 293.

Remote UNIX Clients

Razor can be configured so that clients can access databases on remote machines/networks. See "Remote UNIX Client Applications" on page 301 for details.

Web Clients

A separate product called IssueWeaver® is available from Tower Concepts. IssueWeaver is a highly customizable Web interface to your issues database.

¹ See "How do I set up a single database to be accessed via multiple operating systems?" on page 342.
² With one exception, the RazorNT Server requires a one-time licensing fee per platform.