[mod.computers.vax] Malodorous microvax miscellany

AWalker@RED.RUTGERS.EDU (*Hobbit*) (02/20/86)

We've been playing with our Vaxstation II's for a while, and have come up
with a few problems that seem to have no obvious solution.  Like, "Help!"?

First and foremost, *where* is the escape key on the bloody keyboard?  F11,
as sometimes used on the VT220 and Vaxstation VS100 to send an escape,
insists on sending <esc>[23~, and there's no menu item on these things to
change it.  Forever typing control-[ is a real pain in the tail.  Furthermore,
the other keyboard control character mappings are all screwed up -- ^@ 
sends a ^R, control-other-things send completely unexpected things.  Is there
any way to change the keyboard handler's interpretation of what ascii is??

After I brought up Decnet on them [ethernet style], everything works right
except remote logins.  Whether you do set host <nodename> from outside or
set host 0 from the microvax, the incoming connection is broken before you
even get to log in.  Is the decnet stuff for the microvax designed to do this?
Set host/old, oddly enough, *does* work.  But this doesn't correctly do log
files, which is one thing our group wants to record their sessions.  File 
access and NML and tasks all work fine, just SET HOST connections are rejected.

Another Decnet problem is that SET LOG CONSOLE doesn't work right; event 
messages are never typed out in the operator window and if an event occurs,
the EVL process tries forever to start itself and fails with a non-fatal 
bugcheck.  [I haven't tried to chase down the piece of code, but am just hoping
that someone else has seen this problem before.]  What am I missing to do
event logging properly?  The EVL object points to the right place.  The current
workaround is to disable logging completely, but I'd like to have it around
so I know when hosts go up or down.

Memory:  I am setting up large user working sets, in the hope that one user
can use close to all the physical memory in a process.  The vax in question
has 9M in it.  I give a user about 16000 pages WSEXTENT.  If the process 
grows to a large size, it indeed sucks up a lot of this available memory, but
it *also* sucks up a lot of the pagefile, which I claim shouldn't happen if
the process working set is large enough to hold the process's memory.  Could
someone with a better knowledge of paging dynamics than I explain what's 
going on here?  When the pagefile is more than 50% used for any length of 
time, the box has a strong tendency to wedge completely.

_H*
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