pha@cs.rit.edu (Paul H. Allen) (02/14/89)
Last summer, I upgraded four 3B2/400s and one 3B2/600 to Wollongong's
"Enhanced" TCP/IP WIN/3B, Release 2.1 (WIN is a Trademark of The Wollongong
Group, Inc). These computers belong to the graduate computer science
department which is highly dependent on their network. The faculty and
students soon found out that the software had some serious problems and
looked to me for some answers. I couldn't believe how much functionality
we lost.
Specific problems that we experienced:
1. The remote rn, "rrn", failed due to the system functions, "read" and "write"
not working properly. I finally gave up and rewrote the networking code
using the TLI library.
2. All printing is done on a Citoh and Epson printer via remote shell to
the 3B2/600 from 3b1s. Unfortunately, large files failed to print completely
due to truncation by the remote shell. One grad. student told me he considered
a large file to be at least 5 pages. :-<
3. Screendumps from the 3b1 to the laser printer via remote shell to one
of the 3B2/400s completely failed. Well, sometimes you would get a
partial printing.
4. I use to backup my 40 meg. hard disk to the 3B2/600's 60 meg SCSI tape
drive by executing,
find pha -depth -print | cpio -oBc | remsh ma "dd of=/dev/rSA/qtape1 bs=10b"
But for some reason or other, the command failed complaining about
"too many processes". Huh? it use to work before the upgrade!
5. Now the undergrads fill their labs with suns that currently operate
SunOS4.0 (SunOS is a trademark of Sun Microsystems, Incorporated). Since
I am one of the maintainers of the CS Departments equipment, I occasionally
have a need to transfer files between the Suns and 3B2s. I could transfer
a file by ftp if the sun was doing the "getting" and "putting" but the 3B2
failed, usually producing a zero byte file.
We made all types of noise and finally got the attention of the right people in
that massive AT&T bureaucracy. Most of our problems have been solved by the
efforts of an individual belonging to the AT&T's Tier 4 support group in
Illinois.
What is this article about? You won't believe this, BUT, that same AT&T
bureaucracy claims WE are the only ones that have these problems with this
sofeware, at least that is what they tell our salesman. So, our salesman
asked me to query the readers of this net regarding their experience with
Wollongong's TCP/IP. At least I know better, I've been reading this group
for quite a while now. AND, if you are still having problems, I've been
told, that if you respond, someone from AT&T will contact you. No kidding!
Paul Allen
...!rutgers!rochester!rit!pha Rochester Institute of Technology
pha@cs.rit.edu Computer Science Dept.
pha1775@ritvax One Lomb Memorial Drive
Post Office Box 9887
Rochester, New York 14623-0877david@varian.UUCP (David Brown) (02/16/89)
Well, you're not alone - we also had problems, especially in
regards to remsh. First, incoming remsh from other machines
had problems - after the command completed, the connection
never closed and the user never got his prompt back. I called
the Hotline and they sent me a fix for this (plus a fix for
an rlogin problem in relationship to Suns). The other problem
was outgoing remsh - I was doing backups similar to you:
find . -print | remsh another-machine dd of=/dev/tape
and the throughput was abysmal - I could watch the lights on
the transceiver and see that packets were sent only once every
5 seconds. The Hotline couldn't help, and the problem was
escalated. Months later, I finally received a fix disk from
a different group (in Illinois) and finally we were back to
the level of functionality that we had with rel 1.1 (except
for some header files and socket calls that they seem to have
dropped - I was able to compile and execute ping and a few
other Berkeley programs with 1.1, but not 2.1).
So others have had problems, and there are fixes - you should hammer
on them. I've heard that there will be a new version (2.2) coming
out very shortly, but since I haven't received any official notice,
I expect that it's really months away.
--
David Brown 415-649-4000
Orion Network Systems 1995 University Ave. Suite 350 Berkeley CA 94704
{pacbell,lll-crg,zehntel,ista,rtech,csi,kinetics}!varian!davidshieh@elbereth.rutgers.edu (Andrew Shieh) (02/17/89)
Yes, I have problems with Wollongong's TCP/IP. I am a system programmer and my duty is to support all the 3b2 and 3b15 machines donated by AT&T. I encountered several problems after I have installed the Enchanced TCP/IP WIN/3B Release 1.1 interface packages which are also donated by AT&T. Although I upgraded the package to release 2.1 on the 3B2 machines, these problems still exist. The problems which I have are as follows: 1. The sendmail program cannot receive the mail from BSD UNIX machines (SUNOS, BSD 4.2 or above). I have the 5.58 sendmail source code and left it untouched to compile on 3b2/400 using version 4.2 C compiler. This sendmail did not work either. I got the write error on socket operation. I tried to substitute the Socket compatible library to TLI library. I got the illegal address error message when I tried to t_bind the packet. (Paul, Can you please show me your piece of code to t_bind the local port properly?) 2. The ftp program did not work when I tried to use the put command to put a file on BSD UNIX machines. It produced a zero byte file. 3. I also have the "plp" source code and I tried to port to System V to have networking printing and you know it has the socket calls everywhere. I need a GOOD copy of libnet.a library to make it work. BTW, I have System V release 3.1, WIN TCP/IP release 2.1, and Networking Support Utilities release 1.2 running under either 3b2/310 or 3b2/400. I have System V release 2.1.1 and WIN TCP/IP release 1.1 running under 3B15. I have called the AT&T hotline many times. They were not able to help me in anyway. I was told that the problems would be solved in the next release (3.0?).
wilhite@usceast.UUCP (Robert Wilhite) (02/21/89)
In article <928@cs.rit.edu> pha@cs.rit.edu (Paul H. Allen) writes: >Last summer, I upgraded four 3B2/400s and one 3B2/600 to Wollongong's >"Enhanced" TCP/IP WIN/3B, Release 2.1 . . . . I couldn't believe how >much functionality we lost. > We are experiencing several of these quirks, as well. Remote shells truncate output, FTP yields 0-byte transfers, RLOGIN occasionally fails to recognize trusted systems/users, etc. >...AT&T bureaucracy claims WE are the only ones . . . . 'tain't so. -- Robert Wilhite, Systems Hacker uucp: ncrcae!usceast!wilhite USC Department of Computer Science csnet: wilhite@cs.scarolina.edu Columbia, SC 29208 voice: (803) 777-4611