bill@ssbn.UUCP (Bill Kennedy) (07/05/87)
There is a lot to say about v2.5, some of it good. Overall it was worth
it but it was a genuine pain in the neck. The instructions are clear
enough but following them carefully will get you in trouble. First let me
report on what it does.
The improved modem support is implemented and it's a pleasure. They have
added a backslash M command to turn off modem control (must have DCD to
open) and a backslash m to turn it back on (now wait for carrier) in the
dial strings. They also added an M argument to the device name in Devices
to indicate that this one uses the new strings in Dialers. Those features
work as advertised and as you might expect (what a relief from logging in
NO CARRIER!). Something appears to have gone out of uucico that used to be
there. If you have more than one entry in Systems for a site you call (more
than one number for different lines) the old uucico would try the first one
and proceed with the remaining entries until the call was successful or it
ran out of Systems lines. This one seems to try four times on the first entry
and then gives up if not successful.
There is also some encouragement for COM2 (internal) modem support. The
documentation says that if you are using an AT&T 4112 (internal) modem it
*must* be set for COM2. The dial string for the 4112 in Dialers is identical
to the one for Hayes modems so everything should work for any other garden
variety internal modem that is truly Hayes compatible? Well, maybe, but I
didn't get it to work. I have an internal Zoom Telephonics 2400bps unit that
is addressed at COM2 (checked out and known to work with DOS) and it wouldn't
pee a drop. I thought they might go through some magic to change the port
addressing for COM2, but my external USR, attached to COM1 behaved just like it
did before I reinstalled a 4112, DTR, the whole bit. Maybe there's something
I haven't tried yet (I only got the s/w Thursday), I'll keep trying.
They say that they made considerable improvements to Simul-Task and that
certainly appears to be true. The new version appears to run Simul-Task and
some/anything else, the old version consumed the machine. To put that into
perspective, Friday I was unspooling Stargate news from floppy B (using DOS
copy, del, etc.), restoring some stuff from floppy A, unspooling news from
a uucp session and had a dial up user logged in on the modem ALL AT ONCE! The
system didn't astound you with its speed but the old version would have done
its "let's scribble on the free list and quit without apology" stunt had I
had that much going on. All in all, I find the new version to be much more
robust than its predecessor.
Now for the installation... If you are still reading you need to *keep*
reading! The instructions say to do a full back up prior to installation
and a couple of restores *BEFORE* installing Simul-Task. That's in bold
face type, it should be in international orange ink! In my case the back
up was 29 floppies (1.2Mb) and it took the two hours they said it did. The
install was effortless although it's easy, if you aren't paying attention, to
miss the offer to install Simul-Task at the conclusion of the UNIX install.
Pay attention! Answer "n" when it offers to do it now. They then say to
restore /u from the "Show and Restore Directories" screen. What they don't
say (it's in the Operations Guide) is that you have to take two trips through
the back up diskettes to do it, one to see what directories are there and the
other to do the restore. They also don't say whether or not to allow the
restore to overwrite existing files. They then tell you to run the restore
again on a file basis and restore /etc/passwd, /usr/lib/uucp/Systems, and
/etc/rc.d/setuname.sh. That's OK, but there are a lot more files than just
those that you want out of the old back up. Herein comes the first land mine.
There is some limit to the number of files/directories that you can restore
with one trip through the floppies. Nobody says what it is, but I promise
you that it will quit without apology if you ask for too many. I had good
luck with 9 (since that's what Restore by UNIX Name allows). It took me two
trips through 29 floppies to figure that out.
The next entry in the minefield is Simul-Task itself. They say that after
restoring your files you can "safely install Simul-Task and any add-on pack-
ages you'll need". I didn't restore *everything* in the 29 disk back up,
only what I wanted right now (/etc, /usr/lib/uucp, /usr/lbin). I installed
Simul-Task without anything interesting happening and it worked fine. Then
I finished restoring the big stuff, /usr/spool and all. When that was done
everything made the trip back OK but Simul-Task died. The error message was
"pcisvr: UNIX System DOS communication failure". The book says to re-install
Simul-Task if that happens and if it persists, restore the UNIX kernel. OK,
but Simul-Task won't reinstall. It gets through a couple of resets and reboots
and dies before it asks you for the DOS diskettes. Fine, you can restore the
UNIX kernel (if anyone wants to know how, email me), but you still can't get
Simul-Task to install. I went all of the way back to square one and installed
from scratch (details also available email) and everything went OK.
Something that they don't tell you that will save you some time is with respect
to the hard disk format. You can answer "n" to that and save the time it takes
to format again. If you don't format it will ask you if you want to make the
UNIX file system (warning about destroying the world) and you must answer "y"
to that or it will abort the install. I am using two 40Mb disks on my system
and the format takes a lot of time. The good news there is that if you do have
a second drive you can just mount it after the install and everything is there
just like it was. I have about 30Mb of stuff on drive 1 mounted as /usr, so it
was a matter of backing up the distributed /usr from drive 0, removing, and
mounting drive 1.
The documentation they send is quite complete. They provide an entirely new
Operations guide but it is spiral bound rather than punched to go in the old
binder. They also send replacement pages for the "Getting Started" manual,
that's where they say to restore *BEFORE* installing Simul-Task. In summary,
the upgrade is well worth the $100 or so. It's worth more than that if you
have many modem problems or if you use Simul-Task a lot. I think (can't prove)
that the system runs faster and I am *certain* that it is less fragile than
its predecessor. Nothing is mentioned about needing V2.05 firmware but I
wouldn't be surprised if that was prerequisite. A feature that doesn't make
much difference to me is the DOS 3.2 support. There are two different S-T
diskettes, one for 3.1 and one for 3.2. The installation menu lets you choose
which one you want so presumably you could install 3.1 and upgrade later (just
don't restore anything after you install!). They say that 3.2 has microfloppy
support but I have neither DOS 3.2 nor a 3.5" floppy. The difference in the
displays suggest that the color support is improved too (I have mono).
That made for a long article, but my mail indicates that there are a lot of
PLUS owners out there and I would have been grateful to have had some of these
insights before charging into the minefield.
--
Bill Kennedy {cbosgd | ihnp4!petro | sun!texsun!rrm}!ssbn!bill