Sun-Spots-Request@Rice.edu (William LeFebvre) (10/31/88)
SUN-SPOTS DIGEST Sunday, 30 October 1988 Volume 6 : Issue 279 Today's Topics: Re: Dvi previewer to run under suntools Re: FPU problems in Sun 4/110 Re: RBG monitor for my 150G; power line blues Re: Remove booting a Sun-3/280 -- failure! Re: TTY Windows in Sunview GKS for X windows Shift operations on a Sun 4 More on duping 3-1/2" disks on 386i 386i rlogin to sun3 problem Quota system questions emergency bootables? Algebraic Calctool with Trig Functions? single user while dumping? Send contributions to: sun-spots@rice.edu Send subscription add/delete requests to: sun-spots-request@rice.edu Bitnet readers can subscribe directly with the CMS command: TELL LISTSERV AT RICE SUBSCRIBE SUNSPOTS My Full Name Recent backissues are available via anonymous FTP from "titan.rice.edu". For volume X, issue Y, "get sun-spots/vXnY". They are also accessible through the archive server: mail the request "send sun-spots vXnY" to "archive-server@rice.edu" or mail the word "help" to the same address for more information. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 25 Oct 88 15:45:09 -0700 From: greg@aerospace.aero.org Subject: Re: Dvi previewer to run under suntools A number of people have posted questions about a good dvi previewer for SunView. The one we use is called "texsun" and it comes both as part of the X.V11R2 user contributed distribution (it is hidden away with "texx", just fix the makefile to also make texsun), and with the "TeX" distribution from one of the TeX archives. One really nice thing about texsun is that it uses "gf" format fonts, which come with most TeX distributions. It also has a pretty nice mouse interface (although it is not fancy). snailmail: Greg Sassenrath ARPA: greg@aerospace.aero.org M4-927 The Aerospace Corp. 2350 E. El Segundo Blvd. El Segundo, CA 90245 (213)336-7305 ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 25 Oct 88 15:40:06 EDT From: russ@baklava.mitre.org (Russell Leighton) Subject: Re: FPU problems in Sun 4/110 Earlier I posted a query about the disclaimer included in the README documents that came with my 4/110. The disclaimer reads: __________ FPU Option Deficiency The following information applies only if you have an FPU equipped 4100 CPU board, and only if the board or FPU upgrade was ordered before October 1st 1988. There are several deficient performance factors in FPU chips shipped prior to October 1988. These factors will cause the chip to under- perform its design specification during heavy "number crunching" or benchmarking processes. There should be no indication of deficient performance during normal operation of the system. __________ Since the posting I received a few calls from Sun. Turns out that there is not really a big problem. The FPU bug is with the transcedental functions and results in a small slow down. Otherwise, things are fine and the 4/110 should perform at roughly 60-70% of a 4/280. Russ. ARPA: russ%yummy@gateway.mitre.org Russell Leighton M.S. Z406 MITRE Signal Processing Lab 7525 Colshire Dr. McLean, Va. 22102 USA ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 25 Oct 88 14:40:43 CDT From: cthombor@luke.d.umn.edu (Clark Thomborson) Subject: Re: RBG monitor for my 150G; power line blues I recently posted an item here, asking for info on RBG monitors to upgrade a 3/150G. In the meantime, my 3/50 died, the victim of a power glitch. Morals: 1) get yourself a line protector (any suggestions?) to avoid a $1500 motherboard repair bill; 2) ask your system administrator to rework your local mailer so that you can still receive mail if/when your home machine dies. I'm still interested in the RBG conversion, so please resend your info to cthombor@gw.d.umn.edu. I received just one reply before the crash, from B Wong, who suggests I order a monitor from Sun's spare parts price list. Unfortunately, even with an educational discount, the prices on that list seem inordinately high. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 25 Oct 88 11:14:17 MDT From: woods@handies.ucar.edu (Greg Woods) Subject: Re: Remove booting a Sun-3/280 -- failure! I have encountered (and beat my head against the wall over) this exact problem on several occasions. What it comes down to is: the procedure documented in the manual for booting tapeless workstations DOES NOT WORK (at least, not on a class A or B network; Sun seems to think the whole world is class C; ever try to run setup(8) with class B addressing?) The only way to get it done is to reconfigure the server and set up the tapeless workstation as a diskless client of that server. If your tape server is not configured as a file server, you're truly hosed. If it is, you could simply have your tapeless workstation pretend to be one of the clients of the tape server (edit /etc/ethers appropriately on the tape server). I don't know if this problem is present under 4.0 or not; I have encountered it on Sun 4/280's running SYS4-3.2 and on Sun 3/280's with 3/50's with SCSI disks as tapeless clients running OS 3.5 --Greg ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 25 Oct 88 11:03:20 EDT From: Ellery Chan <ellery@trantor.harris-atd.com> Subject: Re: TTY Windows in Sunview Paul R. Jordan writes: > ...Is there a hard limitation on the number of TTY windows in one > application ?... The different SunView window objects use up file descriptors, of which your program has a finite number (probably ~30). There is a handy table on p.54 of the SunView Programmer's Guide that says: Window Type/Package FD Usage ------------------- -------- Frame 1 Canvas 1 Textsw 3 + (2) { () = temporary } TTYsw 2 Scrollbar 0 Window Manager (1) Unix 3 (stdin/stdout/stderr) Frame buffer 1 Selection Service 3 + (1) You might just be running out of file descriptors. <sys/param.h> defines the constant NOFILE as the max. open files per process. In a pinch, closing std{in,out,err} would get you a couple back. Since a TTY subwindow uses 2 descriptors, it makes sense that the number of subwindows created by your test program decreases by 2*(#TTY's). But I dunno why the descriptors are not being reclaimed when the TTYsw is destroyed. Ellery Y. Chan | Phone : (407) 729-3364 Advanced Technology Department | ARPA : ellery@trantor.harris-atd.com Harris Corporation (GSS) | USmail: PO Box 37, MS 3A-1912 Melbourne, FL 32901 | Melbourne, FL 32902 ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 25 Oct 88 07:41:00 CDT From: sun!shell!jody@decwrl.dec.com (Jody Winston) Subject: GKS for X windows Reference: V6n252 > Is there a public domain or commercially available product which allows a > program to make GKS calls in X-Windows version 11? This is from: grogers@m.cs.uiuc.edu ===== Software Availability Announcement ===== The department of Computer Science and the Graphics Workstation Research Group would like to announce the availability of the XGKS graphics library. At this time it is available only to educational institutions and only for use for internal research and instructional purposes. XGKS is a full implementation of the ANSI standard Graphical Kernel System for use within the X Window System. XGKS provides for two dimensional graphics using ANSI standards within the generally accepted standard X window system. This software has been in use for approximately nine months within the C.S. department for both research and instructional purposes and has been rigorously tested. Highlights: * Full support for ANSI Standard GKS (level 2C) * Support for color and monochrome displays * Runs within the X Window System * Support for multiple windows and displays * Efficient implementation * Rigorously tested * Hides complexity of window system programming Output Primitives: * Polylines (control over color, width, and style) * Markers (color, size, style) * Text (fully transformable, color, 9 font styles) * Polygons (application defined color patterns and colors) * Cell Arrays (transformable pixel arrays) Input Devices: * Locator (tracking cross, rubberband line or box) * Choice (menus or function buttons) * Stroke (point streams) * Valuator (range indicators) * Pick (selection of output primitives) * String (keyboard input) XGKS supports all six logical input devices through the use of a mouse and keyboard. Storage: * Segments (runtime storage of output pickable primitives) * Metafiles (longterm file storage of graphical objects) In addition to the standard segment facility of GKS, XGKS provides storage of non-segment output primitives. This frees the application from the complexity of window system management. XGKS has been thoroughly tested on an IBM RT running Berkeley Unix, and has been ported to the Encore Multmax and Sun workstation. This software is available immediately from the department of Computer Science. For additional information contact: Greg Rogers University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Department of Computer Science 1304 W. Springfield Ave. Urbana, IL 61801 (217) 333-6174 UUCP: {pur-ee,convex,inhp4}!uiucdcs!grogers ARPA: grogers@cs.uiuc.edu CSNET: grogers%uiuc@csnet-relay I'd like to thank everyone who sent me this information. Jody Winston jody@shell.uucp ...!{sun,psuvax1,bcm,rice,decwrl,cs.utexas.edu}!shell!jody Shell Development Company, Bellaire Research Center P.O. Box 481, Room 2202 Houston, TX 77001 (Voice: 713 663-2050) ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 25 Oct 88 10:14:09 CDT From: execu!mike@cs.utexas.edu (mike mccants) Subject: Shift operations on a Sun 4 The compilers translate i << j, i >> j, lshift(i,j), rshift(i,j) to RISC instructions on the Sun4. Unlike a Sun3's 68020 CPU, the RISC CPU treats the shift count modulo 32. In other words, i << 32 is no shift at all! (68020 gives zero.) [[ K&R, page 189, section 7.5: "The shift operators...group left-to-right... The result is undefined if the right operand is negative, or greater than or equal to the length of the object in bits." In this case, the length of the left operand is 32. Any C program that depends on i << 32 being anything other than garbage is a buggy program. --wnl ]] ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 25 Oct 88 10:23:19 EDT From: gfr%wolfgang@gateway.mitre.org (Glenn Roberts) Subject: More on duping 3-1/2" disks on 386i Reference: v6n272 I previously suggested that you could use cp to duplicate 3-1/2" disks on roadrunners. Some of the disks I backed up this way failed when I tried to use them. The procedure I ended up using was: fdformat dd if=/dev/rfd0c of=temp bs=512 count=2880 dd if=temp of=/dev/rfd0c bs=512 count=2880 which does a block-for-block copy. This works but is SLOW (10 minutes per dd step or 20 minutes to backup a disk, plus even more time if you have to fdformat the disk first!). I wonder of there is a disk 'spin up' time that is affecting this? Perfmeter seems to indicate 30 seconds between disk i/o's !! Perhaps by the time this appears in Sun-Spots someone will have suggested a faster way to to this. - Glenn Roberts, MITRE Corporation, McLean VA gfr%wolfgang@gateway.mitre.org ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 25 Oct 88 12:55:56 PDT From: teg@orc.olivetti.com (Tom Griner) Subject: 386i rlogin to sun3 problem We get the error "rcmd: socket: Permission denied" when trying to rsh or rlogin from our 386i's to our Sun3's. We have been running a few 386i's as diskless clients of a 3/280 file server for a few months now. Sun does not support this configuration (yet), but I managed to get it to work by rewriting all of the rc scripts in etc and rearranging the 386i's file system to work in the SunOS 4.0 heterogenius file arrangement. The 3/280's hosts.equiv and .rhosts contain proper entries, so the problem is most probably something with the 386i. I have removed all of the 386i specific rpc daemons that appeared in the 386i's /etc/inetd.conf. I think that the inetd still has everything running that should permit rlogin to work, but for some reason it doesn't. Tom Griner teg@orc.olivetti.com ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 25 Oct 88 13:12:29 CDT From: "Eric C. Pearce" <pearce@tycho.yerkes.uchicago.edu> Subject: Quota system questions I have recently tried to turn on our dist quota system (Sun OS 3.5, 4.2BSD). Several questions have poped up and the system seems somewhat buggy. The questions are: 1. Do I need to run quotacheck each time I edit quota's with edquota? Seems that edquota'ing gets things all out of sync and the partitions quotas files stops updating. 2. Although we are not limiting inodes, the system cannot seem to count files very well. For example, starting with an empty directory... ======= tycho% ls tycho% quota -v Disk quotas for pearce (uid 157): Filesystem usage quota limit timeleft files quota limit timele /usr2 1460 37000 74000 96 0 0 tycho% touch a b c d e tycho% ls a b c d e tycho% quota -v Disk quotas for pearce (uid 157): Filesystem usage quota limit timeleft files quota limit timele /usr2 1460 37000 74000 96 0 0 tycho% rm a b c d e tycho% quota -v Disk quotas for pearce (uid 157): Filesystem usage quota limit timeleft files quota limit timele /usr2 1460 37000 74000 91 0 0 ===== Notice that the number of files did not increase when we created 5 null files, but *did* decrease by 5 when we rm'ed them. Can a user take himself down to zero files this way? 3. How well does the system keep track of usage, particularly since it seems to mess up files counts this bad? Any help would be greatly appreciated (pearce@tycho.yerkes.uchicago.edu). Thanks. - Ecp Eric C. Pearce, Yerkes Observatory, University of Chicago. pearce@tycho.yerkes.uchicago.edu pearce%tycho.yerkes.uchicago.edu@oddjob.uchicago.edu ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 25 Oct 88 13:24:42 EDT From: albert@mssun7.msi.cornell.edu (Jay Albert) Subject: emergency bootables? As a new SysAdmin, I am nervous about our disks. I would like to be able to reboot our Sun3/260 server and 4 Sun3/50 clients off of any of them if one or more fail. Currently, the output of df looks like: Filesystem kbytes used avail capacity Mounted on /dev/xy0a 7511 3998 2761 59% / /dev/xy0f 5071 3848 715 84% /pub.MC68020 /dev/xy0h 113657 63243 39048 62% /usr.MC68020 /dev/xy3c 260874 211557 23229 90% /usr.MC68020/mc3 /dev/xy2c 260874 198129 36657 84% /usr.MC68020/local /dev/xy1c 260874 207690 27096 88% /usr.MC68020/mc1 I have copied our kernel vmunix, as well as diag and boot, into directories in /usr.MC68020/mc1, /usr.MC68020/local, and /usr.MC68030/mc3. Will they be usable if Doomsday comes, and is there anything else I should do? We don't have distribution tapes handy, although there are other machines we could try to boot from over our local network. But booting from the other disks seems easier and more reliable. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 25 Oct 88 13:23:06 EDT From: mfrydenb@server1.prime.com (Mark Frydenberg) Subject: Algebraic Calctool with Trig Functions? Does anyone know of a calctool with operator precedence (i.e., 2+3*4+5 = 19, NOT 25) and trig functions, logarithms, and other assorted goodies? Thanks, Mark Frydenberg mfrydenb@server1.prime.com Software Engr. / Geometry-Surface Modelling Group Computervision, A Division of Prime Computer, Inc. 201 Burlington Road MS 4-1 Bedford, MA 01730 ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 25 Oct 88 13:34:55 EDT From: albert@mssun7.msi.cornell.edu (Jay Albert) Subject: single user while dumping? The manuals all seem to say that you "should" be in single-user mode while making dumps, especially level 0 dumps. I have made some level 0's while in multi-user mode, with a handfull of people on (over several hours). Should I throw them away, or are they probably fine? Dump didn't complain about anything. I haven't tried to restore anything off them yet. ------------------------------ End of SUN-Spots Digest ***********************