Sun-Spots-Request@Rice.edu (William LeFebvre) (10/19/88)
SUN-SPOTS DIGEST Tuesday, 18 October 1988 Volume 6 : Issue 263 Today's Topics: Why is comp.sys.sun/sun-spots moderated/digestified (2) Re: Extension cables Re: DEC LANBRIDGE 100/Sun 4 problems Re: Bitnet mangles source files Re: SunOS 4.0 Suntools speedup Re: Word Processors on Sun/Unix Encoding ASCII Files Problem with FPU on SUN 4/110 CDC 94181 Drive problem Audible appointment notification in calentool? Motorola S-Records on Sun 3/160s? 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: 28 Sep 88 04:24:19 GMT From: casey@cs.ucla.edu Subject: Why is comp.sys.sun/sun-spots moderated/digestified? I know that this has been hashed over in the past, but I still have yet to hear a real reason for why sun-spots is moderated and digestified. At best, whoever the moderator is is totally flooded with mail to the list which must suck up an enormous amount of his time. At worst, the moderator goes on vacation and we get a big delay seeing anything for a bit and then he has to deal with an unbelievable backlog when he gets back. [[ Just to clarify: The last time I was out of town was the July 4th weekend (and that was to attend a wedding). What usually happens is I get busy doing the things I'm suppoesed to be doing. You know...research. --wnl ]] Add to that the inconvenience of having to deal with the digests and it seems to me you have a formula that says this isn't workable. I don't get the advantages of whatever my favorite news/mail reader offers in its current format. Either that, or I have to unpack the stupid digests and apply a new session of my reader against that. And at the volume of sun-spots this is ridiculous. Moderation and digestification seems like a fine idea for a low volume group where you want to maintain a coherent conversation theme, weed out the irrelevant, etc., but sun-spots is not low volume and the interests of Sun users are now so diverse that it's difficult to determine what is irrelevant. I'd like to have a voting session to decide whether sun-spots should be converted to an unmoderated, undigestified news group / mailing list. Probably voting on moderation and digestification should be separate. For instance, comp.unix.ultrix is moderated, but undigestified. Of course digestified, but unmoderated doesn't make sense. P.S. I hope no one takes this as a criticism of the job that William LeFebvre <phil@rice.edu> has been doing. On the contrary, I think that he's been doing a great job. I just think that the job itself is probably a lot of work for what I believe has very little benefit. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 12 Oct 88 15:13:56 CDT From: William LeFebvre <phil@Rice.edu> Subject: Why is comp.sys.sun/sun-spots moderated/digestified (2) I had a quick mail conversation with Casey, in which I discovered that he reads comp.sys.sun via Usenet. There is a tremendous difference between the Internet and the Usenet environments. All Internet "interest groups" are mail based: a submission is sent to a given address and the message gets redistributed to everyone on the main list. Messages on the Usenet are broadcasted: each site sends a copy to all its neighbors that don't already have copies. This list started as an Internet interest group called "Sun-Spots". At that time, Rice was not even on the Internet. We had no choice but to send the messages out in digested form, and that also meant having it moderated. Someone soon decided that it would be a good idea to gateway the digests onto a Usenet list. Since that time, our facilites at Rice have improved tremendously. We have a very reliable connection to (most of) the Internet and we are a Usenet site. Unfortunately, we still have only one machine (and a Sun 2 at that) handling all our Internetwork mail. It has enough trouble delivering one or two digests a day to over 500 addresses. I cannot imagine flooding that machine with 15 to 30 messages a day. So, for the time being, the Internet side must remain in digest form. However, I feel that it is possible (and, in fact, rather easy) to undigest the Usenet side. But I want the readers' opinions first. Casey proposed a vote, and I would like to carry it out: VOTE FOR ONE: [ ] A: Moderated and digestified [ ] B: Moderated but not digestified [ ] C: Unmoderated (and of course undigestified). DEMOGRAPHICS: How do you read Sun-Spots digests: [ ] 1: Via Usenet (readnews, rn, notes) [ ] 2: Via Internet Please mail your votes to the address "votes@titan.rice.edu". Make *sure* that you use that specific address and no other. By the way, I already have Casey's vote. If a solid majority of the Usenet readers want to do away with digestification, then it will happen in short order. Beyond that, this is primarily an opinion poll (because any other changes cannot happen any time soon). William LeFebvre ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 13 Oct 88 07:04:13 EDT From: chuck@wooglin.scc.com (Charles Williams) Subject: Re: Extension cables First, thanks to all of you who replied to my request for extension cables. The situtation for extension cables is as follows: 1) buy the cable & connectors and make them yourself, or 2) buy them from Artecon. Artecon sells extension kits (which include video, keyboard, and mouse(?) extension cables) in either 70 or 100 ft length. High resolution monchrome monitors can only be extended 70 ft before the video signal begins to breakup (although I imagine a signal booster could be used.) The Artecon kits run for $695.00 (that's not a typo!!). The vital info for Artecon is: Phone 619-931-5500 or 800-USA-ARTE (872-2783). Ask for Katherine Hartsell or Lucky Morrison. Chuck Williams Contel Federal Systems All remarks made here are my own, etc., etc., etc. ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 13 Oct 88 10:43:02 EDT From: jas@proteon.com (John A. Shriver) Subject: Re: DEC LANBRIDGE 100/Sun 4 problems If a LANBridge 100 has stopped forwarding broadcast packets, you may have encountered a bug in some versions of their software. In some versions (not the first, not the latest), if someone sends an Ethernet packet with a source address of FFFFFFFFFFFF, then LANBridge will gladly put that into the address table for that Ethernet. Forever afterwards, that LANBridge will not forward broadcast packets from that Ethernet, since it "knows" that FFFFFFFFFFFF is on that Ethernet, so it does not need to forward the packet. Power-cycling flushes the address tables, fixing it. The fix is never to consider FFFFFFFFFFFF as an address for inclusion in the address tables. ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 13 Oct 88 9:07:15 BST From: Colin Walls <ctw%CNS.UMIST.AC.UK@cunyvm.cuny.edu> Subject: Re: Bitnet mangles source files We have multiple problems going through BITNET machines. Firstly tabs are expanded and not always to the default spacing of 8 characters. This plays havoc with Makefiles. Secondly ``long'' lines, i.e. more than 80 characters after expansion get folded onto a second line, playing havoc with patches. Last and worst we get character transliteration, uparrow () going to tilde (^) and tilde going to percent (%). The killer is that percent doesn't get transliterated at all! Colin Walls Janet: Colin@uk.ac.umist DARPA: Colin@umist.ac.uk Uucp: ukc!umist.ac.uk!Colin Tel: 061-236-3311 x 2626 International: +44-61-228-3311 x 2626 ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 13 Oct 88 10:19:14 PDT From: stevo@judy.jpl.nasa.gov (Steve Groom) Subject: Re: SunOS 4.0 Suntools speedup >From: dg-rtp!meissner@mcnc.org (Michael Meissner) >This is relayed from our Sunyvale people who helped Sun find it, but for >some reason, Sun isn't publishing it. >... >the patch: >Edit /etc/syslog.conf and enter the following line before the first >non-comment line, starting in column 1 (note the comma space): >define(LOGFILE, 1) >... This is documented in the "SunOS Release 4.0 READ THIS FIRST", which was included with your 4.0 distribution tapes. (Rev A, 9 May 1988, Part No: 800-1737-15). [[ Another poster pointed put that it was on page 3, item 7. --wnl ]] It amazes me how many people seem to just skip this stuff. I might be tempted to, knowing how many "READ ME FIRST" notices that come with a SunOS release, but the way I see it, they don't go to the trouble of including those things for nothing! [[ All together now: "RTFM!" ;-) --wnl ]] And yes, the patch described does make a big difference in performance for two reasons. First, syslogd stops chewing up all your idle CPU time (and then some), and second, it stops generating error messages that gradually fill up /var. Steve Groom, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA 91109 Internet: stevo@elroy.jpl.nasa.gov UUCP: {ames,cit-vax}!elroy!stevo ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 13 Oct 88 08:11:42 EDT From: Chuck Musciano <chuck@trantor.harris-atd.com> Subject: Re: Word Processors on Sun/Unix > Where can I get info on popular word processing packages on the Sun? We are very happy with Frame Maker, from Frame Technology. It is a WYSIWYG doc-gen package with a variety of graphical and textual features. It can drive PostScript printers, like the LaserWriter. We do everything from memos to viewgraphs to reference manuals in it. You can get a demo copy by sending a blank tape to Frame Technology. Call 1-408-433-3311 for more info, or send a message to sun!frame!comments (frame!comments@sun.com for InterNetters). Service is good (usually 24 hour acknowledgement of all e-mail) and the people are friendly and competent. Chuck Musciano Advanced Technology Department Harris Corporation (407) 727-6131 ARPA: chuck@trantor.harris-atd.com ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 13 Oct 88 08:03:25 EDT From: Chuck Musciano <chuck@trantor.harris-atd.com> Subject: Encoding ASCII Files Well, perhaps my recent posting about encoding files was warranted. I have discovered that uu{en,de}code uses the 64 characters from the middle of ASCII, beginning with ' ': " !"#$%&'()*+,-./0123456789:;<=>?@ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ[\]^_" [ Everybody, check this line against ASCII 0x20 through 0x5f to see how your mailer really did. -chuck ] If everyone will get out their System/360 green card (children in the audience will not know of what I speak) [[ mine's yellow...I guess because it's a 370 card. --wnl ]], you will note that EBCDIC does not have a '^' character. Thus EBCDIC/ASCII translation of uuencoded files is doomed. Further, Ole Nielsen reports that Bitnet mailers strip trailing blanks from lines, and convert all tabs to four blanks. The former further confuses uudecode, the latter ruins plaintext makefiles. Several people have sent programs which encode into [a-zA-Z0-9+-]. This is a good idea, but how do we bootstrap this process and distribute the encode/decode tools to everyone? I'd be glad to drive this process, if anyone has any good ideas... [[ Iain Fleming and I did some experimenting with this problem, and now I can't find the appropriate messages. There is a Bitnet node between him and I that does (at least) the following munging (and this is from memory): '{' -> '^G', '}' -> '$', '~' -> '^', '^' -> something I can't remember. Anyone remember the first PostScript file for Sun binder labels? It had this munging done to it, especially to "{" and "}". Fortunately, uu{en,de}code doesn't use most of those, but it does use carat ('^'). --wnl ]] Chuck Musciano Advanced Technology Department Harris Corporation (407) 727-6131 ARPA: chuck@trantor.harris-atd.com ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 13 Oct 88 10:19:28 EDT From: russ@baklava.mitre.org (Russell Leighton) Subject: Problem with FPU on SUN 4/110 On delivery of our Sun 4/110's the README ME FIRST page of the documentation read: 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. We bought our 4/110s for number crunching! Is there a fix for this? My Sun rep never seems to get back to me on this point. Russ ARPA: russ@mitre.arpa Russell Leighton M.S. Z406 MITRE Signal Processing Lab 7525 Colshire Dr. McLean, Va. 22102 USA ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 13 Oct 88 10:01:43 PDT From: geoffb@ale.ind.trw.com (G. Geoffrey Baehr) Subject: CDC 94181 Drive problem Folks, has anyone seen problems connecting CDC 94181 SCSI drives to a SUN 3/280 using the SUN VME SCSI controller ? These are 620 Mb 5.25" drives; when connected to the SCSI Bus, they hang up the bus by not acknowledging extended write/read commands. Short ( < 512 byte) write/reads are fine, but long/multiple ones inevitably result in a hang, the controller in the 3/280 never sees the ack and sits, waiting forever for it. The host must be rebooted to clear the bus. The problem here is probably related to the new Emulex SCSI controller on each drive, since they are integrated with the drive and also have no easily ( read as " all surface mount components") changeable PROMS or other configurable part, are we out of luck ? Yes, we fooled with 'em for several days of continuous effort and are out of ideas. Is this another manifestation of a not quite SCSI compliant implementation on someone's part ? By the way, the SUN is using 3.5 SUN/OS. Replies will be summarized to the list. Thanks! geoffrey baehr TRW ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 13 Oct 88 10:09:33 EDT From: Craig Sarazin <cls7i@astsun2.acc.virginia.edu> Subject: Audible appointment notification in calentool? I have recently started to use the Sunwindows tool "calentool" to keep track of appointments, and I really like it. It makes it easy look at several weeks at a time. The program "calenmail" sends you mail when you log in, reminding you of your appointments that day. I do think that there is one major flaw in calentool, and I was wondering if anyone knew of a fix for this problem. When your appointments arrive, calentool "notifies" you by turning the icon for the tool to reverse video. (Normally, you would only have the window open when you were entering appointments, and would leave it closed to an icon most of the time.) The problem with the change to reverse video is that it is very hard to notice if you are not working on the Sun, or you are talking on the phone, or even if you are working intently in some other window on the Sun. It would be much better if calentool also notified you by ringing the bell. This works very well with "mailtool", which reverses the icon, rings the bell twice, and changes to the "mail in the box" icon. Does anyone know of a fix for this? It is preferable to mail replies directly to me, but I also read this news regularly. Craig Sarazin cls7i@virginia.edu Department of Astronomy BITNET: cls7i@virginia Univ. of Virginia Phone: 804-924-4903 Charlottesville, VA 22903 ------------------------------ Date: 12 Oct 88 11:23:01 GMT From: Malcolm Cook <mcvax!cs.kl.ac.uk!malcolmc@uunet.uu.net> Subject: Motorola S-Records on Sun 3/160s? I am looking for a program to compile Motorola S-Records from standard 68000 assembler code. I am thinking of using a Burr-Brown MPV940 Intelligent I/O controller to provide real time control on a Sun 3/160. Any information on the use of the Burr-Brown board would be most appreciated aswell. Yours a prospective buyer, Malcolm ------------------------------ End of SUN-Spots Digest ***********************