Sun-Spots-Request@RICE.EDU (Vicky Riffle) (08/22/86)
SUN-SPOTS DIGEST Friday, 22 August 1986 Volume 4 : Issue 26 Today's Topics: Setup flames and Comments (4) Long cable for monochrome monitors Ringing the console bell in 3.0? SCSI disks? BIBTEX on a SUN3? KEE on SUN-3? Serial Line IP Package? SunUNIFY vs. SunINGRES? How do I redirect input with WIN_INPUT_DESIGNEE? Circuit-analysis software? Dbxtool? Request for Help with Sun Windows? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Date: Fri, 15 Aug 86 19:07:39 EDT From: Matt Landau <mlandau@Diamond.BBN.COM> Subject: Setup flames and Comments (1) [Sun-SPOTS v4n25] >From: Keith Cooper <cooper@rice.edu> >Subject: Setup flames and Comments (1) > > Try using it >to install software on a working network. Of course it doesn't work, it >only appears to be able to deal with internet addresses beginning with >the SUN default network. If your site has class A or B addresses, well, >that's too bad. Actually, I've recently used setup to install 8 Sun 3's (3 servers, 5 diskless) on a running class B network. One of those servers was being installed tapeless using another machine on the same network as a tapeserver. Try *that* when you can't use you real network address! It was no fun, but after doing it the first time, I came up with a hack that works to get around setup's bogus requirement that you use a class C network address. When you're in mini-Unix, before invoking setup, create an /etc/hosts file that contains the REAL network address of your servers, clients, and any other important machines on the local network, and reboot mini-Unix. Then make your /etc/hosts file mode 222 and run setup. When setup asks for internet addresses, give it anything -- it doesn't matter what, because when setup tries to create the new /etc/hosts file, it won't be able to overwrite the (correct) file that you've already installed. Since setup doesn't expect this step to fail, it ignore the failure and proceeds with the installation, which works just fine! The only other thing to know is that setup WILL build bogus /etc/hosts files for your client machines, so you'll need to replace them before you can boot the diskless machines. Just mount the diskless clients' root partitions (using /dev/ndl0, /dev/ndl1, etc.) on /mnt and do a "cp /etc/hosts /mnt/etc/hosts" for each one. Your clients should now be able to boot and all your machines should run correctly on the local (class A or B) network. While we're on flames, has anyone figured out why Sun 3/75's get bogus entries inserted into the kernel routing tables at boot time if you're not running routed? On each of our machines, netstat -r shows an entry looking like "default 0.0.xx.yy" where xx and yy are two random numbers. They're different for each machine, but always the same for a given machine, so the first thing each diskless machine's /etc/rc.local does is /usr/etc/route delete 0 <bogus-addr>. But I sure would like to know what's causing it. I've spoken to Sun about it half a dozen times and each time gotten a lot of head scratching and "We don't know"s. -- Matt Landau BBN Laboratories, Inc. mlandau@diamond.bbn.com 10 Moulton Street, Cambridge MA 02238 ...harvard!diamond.bbn.com!mlandau (617) 497-2429 ----------------------------- Date: Fri, 15 Aug 86 15:07:10 CDT From: oddjob!fermi!sra@lbl-csam.ARPA (Scott Anderson) Subject: 3.0 Setup (2) > A Sun "customer support engineer" told me that Sun "does not support" > running 68010 binaries on a 68020 cpu. This sucks---but at least it's a > reason for automagically providing two full sets of binaries. It is not true that 68010 binaries can't be run on a 68020 cpu; maybe what you mean is that setup does not support 68010-binaries-only when there are Sun-3's present. But in any case you probably will need the 68020 binaries that go in the root partition of a Sun-3 client, i.e. for it's kernel. > Of course it doesn't work, it only appears to be able to deal with > internet addresses beginning with the SUN default network. If your > site has class A or B addresses, well, that's too bad. This was a minor annoyance; we're a class B network, 128.135.*, and setup insisted on the individual host numbers for the last two bytes (the much-discussed lack of subnetting). So, instead of 128.135.4.6, I had to type in 128.135.1030. My own beef with setup is that it would not allow me to designate an over-lapping partition on the root disk. We have all of our user files on a second disk, so I had no use for the 'd' partition. I therefore wanted to put the client partitions there, rather than have them be nebulously in the 'c' partition. Not possible with setup -- at some point I'll have to fire up diag, I guess. It would also be nice if the default edit card in the client setup would include the root parts of the ethernet and Internet numbers. I very quickly got tired of typing "8:0:20:1:" which is the same for all Sun equipment. Despite these inflexibilities, I was very impressed with setup. It did an awful lot of the work for me, especially since we have mixed binaries, and generally it did it very well. Sun obviously put a lot of effort into the program; hopefully the next version will give the installer a little more control over things. Scott Anderson ihnp4!oddjob!kaos!sra ----------------------------- Date: Mon, 18 Aug 86 20:42:12 pdt From: Charles L. Athey III <athey@lll-lcc.ARPA> Subject: 3.0 Setup (3) Keith Cooper commented that Setup was and is nothing more than a demonstration program. This is a totally incorrect statement. We at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab participated in the design review and the beta testing of Setup. It was NOT designed as a Demo program. I would agree that Setup has some problems, especially when us hackers would like to Fix certain things. BUT who do you think Sun is selling all of their machines to? NOT UNIX gurus or even computer programmers. We have purchased roughly 75 machines during the last 3 months and maybe 20 of them have gone to computer programmers - of these 5 were knowledgable in UNIX. Most were physicists, geologists, etc. These people don't know anything about setting up a machine and they LOVE setup. Yes it has problems but it is a whole lot better than what we used to have to do with Sun release 0.3, remember THAT!! Setup WAS written for the NOVICE! Come on Keith - you know better than to make rash statements about things you have not been really involved with. As for Keith's statement that he can't get anyone in Tech support who has been there any length of time I would say HOGWASH! Most of those actually responding have been there awhile now. Those that return your call, not those that answer it initially. I make about 3 software calls to Sun each week and I have not had a new person in over 3 months. PLUS - if you ask for a specific person to be assigned your call you will probably get them...I have done this at least 10 times in the last 2 months and have ALWAYS had the requested person be assigned. Keith, you have been working with Suns for a long time, don't you know some of the Tech support staff? Just ask for someone you know. I know that Sun has some problems, will falsely stating things help though? If you don't get good service go to the next person up the ladder - it ALWAYS works for me. ----------------------------- Date: Fri, 22 Aug 86 10:00:13 cst From: Keith Cooper <cooper@rice.edu> Subject: 3.0 Setup (4) Chuck - One of the problems with the written word is that sarcasm is sometimes difficult to detect; certainly my remarks about Setup contained some severe sarcasm. Unfortunately, they also contain large grains of truth. Setup has dumped core for me in numerous ways: it has severe problems with termcap entries it doesn't like, with remote tapes, and with internet addresses it doesn't like. My whole point, Chuck, is that SMI is selling machines to people who aren't hackers; are they expected to figure these things out when SUN tech support can't? In one case, the local office finally loaned us a screen, keyboard, and mouse because we couldn't get a reasonable workaround to our problem three days of trying. Sure, I know people in tech support. I still got six pieces of electronic mail telling me "if you'd just read page xxx, you'd see how to use it." Unfortunately, Setup had undocumented restrictions that the manual never mentioned and the tech support people hadn't yet discovered. By and large, the problems I've seen haven't been with old, exotic, and unsupported configurations; they've been fresh out of the box SUN 3 systems. My real intent was to mention (again) that we might be better served if some of the effort spent on Setup's user interface had been directed at its function, instead. Too many naive users in this town have called me up when the combination of documentation and help from tech support failed to bail them out of their problems with this externally beautiful program. keith ----------------------------- Date: Sun, 17 Aug 86 02:22:21 PDT From: hoptoad!gnu@lll-crg.ARPA (John Gilmore) Subject: long cable for monochrome monitors I have done this, and it's not very hard. Happily, the connector pinouts are specified in the hardware installation manual. The video cable is a 9-pin cable. I found a 9-pin male to female straight-thru cable at my local Zack Electronics store and it worked fine as an extender. The keyboard/mouse cable is a 15-pin cable in which only some of the pins are used. I tore up an unused Ethernet transceiver cable (I had to move a few pins to make all the right pins have wire behind them). It won't screw on to the connectors, since it has Ethernet style slide lock posts, but I removed the posts so it would fit, and it only falls off (aborting my system, thank you Tom) every 6 months or so. ----------------------------- Date: Fri, 15 Aug 86 18:52:50 PDT From: akkana@infidel.ARPA (Akkana) Subject: ringing the console bell in 3.0? Remember the ^G suntools dilemma in 2.x? Sun consoles were perfectly capable of beeping, but for some reason Sun decided not to include that in suntools -- when a window received a ^G, it would flash rather than giving an audible signal. Well, now it seems that 3.0 has the opposite problem -- suntools has a bell option, but it is no longer possible to ring the bell through ^G on the bare console without suntools -- a ^G does nothing! I have found ioctls which turn the console bell on and off, but I haven't been able to find a way of telling the console to beep when it sees a ^G. This means that programs like vi, talk, etc. are no longer able to communicate properly. A quick call to Sun Tech Support seems to indicate that this is a "feature", not a "bug". Does anyone know whether there is a way to make ^G ring the console bell, Tech Support notwithstanding? (A way which does not require a source license, that is.) Leaving out the console bell after being persuaded to add it to suntools seems too silly to be likely. .. ...Akkana Center for Nonlinear Studies, LANL akkana%cnls@lanl.arpa hp@lanl.arpa escher!cnls!akkana ----------------------------- Date: Sat, 16 Aug 86 13:38:57 EDT From: Barry Shein <bzs@BU-CS.BU.EDU> Subject: SCSI disks? I was at the MacWorld expo (I think that's what it's called, here in Boston this week) and noticed one vendor was advertising a nice range of SCSI disks (Mirror Technologies.) The one that caught my eye was a 172MB (formatted) little box with 30msec average access and approx 1MB/sec transfer rate (my first remark was, omigod, it's an RP06!) I believe the price to a University would be about $5500 (maybe a little less.) Does anyone know any reason off-hand why this -wouldn't- work with a SUN/SCSI? I assume there could be some trivia with cabling and explaining it to diag (and maybe setup), but otherwise it seems like it should just work. Thoughts? I may ask them for a loaner and report back, but I figured someone out there could save us both some time and trouble if there's a fatal flaw I am missing. -Barry Shein, Boston University ----------------------------- Date: Sat, 16 Aug 86 15:07:24 EDT From: Barry Shein <bzs@BU-CS.BU.EDU> Subject: BIBTEX on a SUN3? Has anyone gotten bibtex from the UNIX TeX distribution working? It seemed at first the problem was just that the language they used felt that 'others' was the choice of the week for a default case while the local choice of the week was 'otherwise'. A global replace got it to compile but it sputtered messages and died when it tried to imbibe plain.bst. Thanks in advance, I have a user here who thinks fixing this will improve his lot in life. -Barry Shein, Boston University Hell hath no wrath like a language ill-defined ----------------------------- Date: Tue, 19 Aug 86 11:01:22 -0200 From: Eric Ole Barber <Barber%vax.runit.unit.uninett@tor.ARPA> Subject: KEE on SUN-3? Does anyone know the status of KEE on SUN-3? I ask because a colleague was at AAAI-86 and IntelliCorp refused to demonstrate either KEE or Simkit on the SUN-3 which they had in the room. If KEE does in fact work on SUN-3, is it a completely self-enclosed sub-environment, or are 'outs' to the operating system possible? ----------------------------- Date: Tue, 19 Aug 86 08:20:48 MDT From: uplherc!saturn!jr@utah-cs.arpa (J.R. Westmoreland) Subject: Serial Line IP Package? I'm interested in finding some one who has installed the Serial Line IP package on a SUN2 or SUN#. I have tried to install the package with less than success. I have found at least one error and several possible incompatable calls to functions. Has anyone else found the same problems? I would appreciate any helpfull suggestions that any one could give me. J.R. Westmoreland ...!utah-gr!uplherc!jr ...!decwrl!esunix!uplherc!jr ----------------------------- Date: Tue, 19 Aug 86 14:12:16 cdt From: carol@pax.cs.UTEXAS.EDU Subject: SunUNIFY vs. SunINGRES? We are planning to buy database software from Sun, either Ingres or Unify. Does anyone have comments on the merits of one system over the other? First hand experience with bugs, performance, user interface, RPT vs. Report Writer, etc. would be appreciated. We'll be running it on Sun 3/160s, one with 4MB memory and the other with 8MB. Carol Kroll carol@sally.utexas.edu ut-sally!carol ----------------------------- Date: Tue, 19 Aug 86 19:50:19 PDT From: jwm@renoir.Berkeley.EDU (Jeff Mc Carrell) Subject: Help needed: how do I redirect input with WIN_INPUT_DESIGNEE? My application has a large image window and a smaller message window (both canvases) that is used only for ascii messages/prompts and the like. I'd like to have any input that the user might type in the small message window offered to and handled by the image window. I'm running SunView 3.0. The documentation for the WIN_INPUT_DESIGNEE (SunView Programmer's Guide, pgs 42 & 68) parameter leads me to believe that it is exactly the facility I need; however, I can't seem to make it work correctly. When I try to hand the window (the handle returned by window_create) as the argument to WIN_INPUT_DESIGNEE as suggested by the documentation, I get an ioctl error as in: message = window_create(frame, CANVAS, ... 0); image = window_create(frame, CANVAS, ... 0); ... window_set(message, WIN_INPUT_DESIGNEE, image, 0); yields: WIN ioctl number 806C6714: Invalid argument handing window_set the image's file descriptor as the argument as in: window_set(message, WIN_INPUT_DESIGNEE, (int) window_get(image, WIN_FD), 0); gets rid of the ioctl error, but instead of appearing in my image window, keystrokes are passed to the parent (the shell). I surmise that for some reason my image window is refusing them and they are then being passed to the next link, which is presumably the parent of the process, or the shell. Note that my input masks for the image window are already set up to accept keystrokes. As long as the user types in the image window, everthing is fine. My question: Has anyone succeeded in using the WIN_INPUT_DESIGNEE parameter to pass input among tiled windows of a single frame? If so, how? thanks, Jeffrey W. McCarrell Computer Science Division 571 Evans Hall U. C. Berkeley Berkeley, CA 94720 jwm@renoir.Berkeley.EDU ----------------------------- Date: Wed, 20 Aug 86 09:29:33 CDT From: wucec2!rfh0023@seismo.CSS.GOV (Ramon Fernando Herrera) Subject: Circuit-analysis software? I am looking for a program that does analysis of electrical circuits on an Apollo or Sun computer. The ideal program should make extensive use of interactive computer graphics, for both input and output. Please mail me any information you may have. ----------------------------- Date: Wed, 20 Aug 86 15:19:30 +0100 From: enea!suadb!anders@seismo.CSS.GOV (Anders Bj|rnerstedt) Subject: Dbxtool? In the July 1986 issue of Software-Practice and Experience there is an article by E. Adams and S.S. Muchnick with the title: "Dbxtool: A Window-Based Symbolic Debugger or Sun Workstations". Since it seems to be a very useful tool I am interested in whether it is available (with or without support), at what cost, and on which Sun4.2 release ? --------------------- Anders Bj|rnerstedt (The vertical bar is actually an 'o' with two dots over it, pronounced like: Bjurnerstedt) Department of Information Processing & Computer Science University of Stockholm S-106 91 Stockholm Sweden UUCP: {seismo,mcvax,cernvax,diku,ircam,prlb2,tut,ukc,unido}!enea!suadb!anders ARPA: enea!suadb!anders@seismo.arpa ----------------------------- Date: Fri, 15 Aug 86 03:51:42 edt From: ihnp4!mb2c!edsdrd!web <William E. Bejcek> Subject: Request for Help with Sun Windows? I was wondering if someone could give me a hand with what seems like a very small and simple problem. The problem is as follows: I have a program that uses stdin and stdout all over the place that also would like to pop-up a menu off of the window (ShellTool) that it is running in. How can I get a handle on the window so that my program can call menu_show () ? It looks like there is some stuff (WINDOW_ME) in the environment, but I'm not sure what it gets me. We are going to try to open it and use menu_show_using_fd (). I guess another possibility would be to create a window for my program to run in, hence, I'll have the handle for the pop-up menu. But, it looks like all my stdin and stdout stuff won't work. Is there a good way to set this up and allow me to still use stdin and stdout? If there is, this seems like the best approach since I'll be able to create other window type objects off my program's main window. The bottom line is that I'd like to reduce porting effort, but still be able to get at all the neat stuff on the SUN. Obviously, I'll need to port the window interface routines of mine, I just want to minimize the rest of the porting effort (ie, I don't want to change all the fprintf calls). Any suggestions? ihnp4!mb2c!edsdrd!web <William E. Bejcek> ----------------------------- End of SUN-Spots Digest ***********************