Sun-Spots-Request@RICE.EDU (William LeFebvre) (07/15/88)
SUN-SPOTS DIGEST Wednesday, 13 July 1988 Volume 6 : Issue 137 Today's Topics: Re: Deliver mail to receiver's login directory Re: max filesystem size under 4.0 more 4.0 follies security Calctool fix Upgrade poll results Comments and questions about Suntools under 4.0 Sun IPC question graphical SunView panel editor? Course schedule for SUN Training? documentation for the Sun Macro Package tmac.sun? is the 386i fully source compatible with Sun-3s? 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: Sat, 2 Jul 88 14:51:39 BST From: Andrew Findlay <Andrew.Findlay%brunel.ac.uk@nss.cs.ucl.ac.uk> Subject: Re: Deliver mail to receiver's login directory Reference: v6n120 In Sun-Spots digest v6n120, Howard Gayle suggets putting mail in user login directories. At Brunel University (UK) we do exactly that. Mail is delivered into a file called '.mailbox', by a program that understands the odd things that might happen to soft-mounted NFS filesystems. We use modified versions of elm and Mail (which also supports mailtool). There is a new mail-notification service to make sure that users get told about arriving mail even if they are not logged on to the machine doing the delivery. The home-directory mail system is now running on two Pyramids and a number of Suns at Brunel. If there is sufficient interest, I can supply source for the delivery and notification programs. The modifications to Mail and elm may be more difficult, as Sun source code is required to recompile Mail and our version of elm is now out of date. I am about to start work on elm version 1.7, so in due course I should be able to supply diffs. Andrew Andrew Findlay at Brunel University, Uxbridge, UB8 3PH, UK Andrew.Findlay@brunel.ac.uk phone: +44 895 74000 x2512 ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 5 Jul 88 11:50:50 EDT From: dpz@njin.rutgers.edu (David P. Zimmerman) Subject: Re: max filesystem size under 4.0 From: dms@wheaties.ai.mit.edu (David M. Siegel) Does anyone know if Sun fixed the bug in OS 3.X that limited filesystems to be under 512 Mbytes? Seems to be, if having a Hitachi 900Mb drive as a single 900Mb partition signifies being fixed. We've got this on a Sun 4/280 running 4.0. ^David ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 4 Jul 88 23:12:10 EDT From: hedrick@aramis.rutgers.edu (Charles Hedrick) Subject: more 4.0 follies It appears that the 4.0 boot code uses a 16-byte buffer to store the host name for the server. This explains why one site had to go from foo.bar.edu to foo. We noticed this when boot crashed with an illegal memory reference. The address it was trying to dereference turned out to be ASCII /EDU / So it's fairly clear that the host name simply overwrote an adjacent pointer. Host name fields should be at least 256 bytes, or even better, dynamically allocated. But for the moment, if you're going to move to 4.0, your diskless machines had better have host names that are less than 16 bytes. (You have to allow one byte for a trailing null, I presume.) [Didn't I post this before to sun-spots? I could have sworn I had, but a message in 6:126 suggests that it didn't get out.] Also, the infamous out of band data byte bug is with us again. We have to fix this in every release. The symptom is that when you rlogin between two 4.0 machines and enter Emacs, half the time ^S will freeze output rather than search. rlogind sends an out of band message telling rlogin to turn off xon/xoff processing. However a bug in uipc_socket prevents the message from getting through about half the time. It's worse on connections with a speed imbalance (with rlogind machine faster than the rlogin machine, as I recall). A 3/50 talking to a 4/280 sometimes fails all the time. We did send this fix to sunbugs about a year ago. We'll do it again when we get source to 4.0 and can develop an appropriate fix. This time I'll follow the advice I've gotten from various friends and send the fix directly to friends within Sun. It appears that when the bozo-catchers don't understand a bug report, it gets dropped. For the moment we're telling users to use telnet instead of rlogin. Anybody know when source to 4.0 will be shipped? We're trying to get 4.0 up by Sept, since otherwise we have to wait until January. This requires us to get source within a couple of weeks. We can hardly give users an OS where rlogin doesn't work, and there are a few other serious things that we have to fix as well. Presumably other universities are in the same position. I know there's a feeling in industry that "universities don't understand deadlines", but I tell ya, there's no way we can slip the start of classes... There aren't many vendors that I can count on to know what a hard deadline like that means. ------------------------------ Date: 4 Jul 88 17:38 -0700 From: honman <honman%cmpt.sfu.cdn@ean.ubc.ca> Subject: security Is there a special mailing list for system administrators to discuss security holes in SUN's OS? We have found 2 security holes with SUN's OS but do not know how to relate the information to other system administrators. We have informed our local SUN technical support, whom we believe have related the information to other SUN technical supports. However, the information doesn't seem to have been passed on to other system adminstrators. Hon-Man Wong Manager, Software Systems School of Computing Science Simon Fraser University Burnaby, B.C. CANADA V5A 1S6 Email: honman@cmpt.sfu.cdn ...!ubc.cs!fornax!honman ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 30 Jun 88 09:07:41 EDT From: Chuck Musciano <chuck@trantor.harris-atd.com> Subject: Calctool fix I have found the cause of the window layout problem in calctool described in my last message to Sun-Spots. It turns out that I created the key window with the attribute WIN_COLUMNS set to 45. The window is created by taking the width of the default font, and multiplying by 45. If your default font is not 8 pixels wide, you will have problems. A simple fix is to modify the creation of the keys window to set WIN_WIDTH to 360. This is the width in pixels, and is invariant between machines. A patch to do just this follows. Chuck Musciano Advanced Technology Department Harris Corporation (407) 727-6131 ARPA: chuck@trantor.harris-atd.com #! /bin/sh # This is a shell archive. Remove anything before this line, then unpack # it by saving it into a file and typing "sh file". To overwrite existing # files, type "sh file -c". You can also feed this as standard input via # unshar, or by typing "sh <file", e.g.. If this archive is complete, you # will see the following message at the end: # "End of shell archive." # Contents: patch # Wrapped by chuck@melmac on Thu Jun 30 09:07:19 1988 PATH=/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/ucb ; export PATH if test -f 'patch' -a "${1}" != "-c" ; then echo shar: Will not clobber existing file \"'patch'\" else echo shar: Extracting \"'patch'\" \(583 characters\) sed "s/^X//" >'patch' <<'END_OF_FILE' X*** screen.c Thu Jun 30 08:58:50 1988 X--- screen.c.new Thu Jun 30 08:59:01 1988 X*************** X*** 142,148 **** X sw = window_create(bf, PANEL, 0); X display = window_create(bf, CANVAS, 0); X keys = window_create(bf, PANEL, X! WIN_COLUMNS, 45, X PANEL_ACCEPT_KEYSTROKE, TRUE, X PANEL_BACKGROUND_PROC, kb_proc, X 0); X--- 142,148 ---- X sw = window_create(bf, PANEL, 0); X display = window_create(bf, CANVAS, 0); X keys = window_create(bf, PANEL, X! WIN_WIDTH, 360, X PANEL_ACCEPT_KEYSTROKE, TRUE, X PANEL_BACKGROUND_PROC, kb_proc, X 0); END_OF_FILE if test 583 -ne `wc -c <'patch'`; then echo shar: \"'patch'\" unpacked with wrong size! fi # end of 'patch' fi echo shar: End of shell archive. exit 0 ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 29 Jun 88 01:54:50 MDT From: dieter@titan.nmt.edu Subject: Upgrade poll results First, an apology. About the same time as my poll appeared in Sun-Spots, our network connection went on vacation for a week or so. Even when it came back, our domain wasn't registered with the Internet folks, so getting mail to me was much harder than I'd thought it would be. Thank you to those hardy souls who refused to take "network unreachable" as an answer. Anyway, here is a summary of the 14 responses to my survey about the usability of Sun upgrade and installation scripts. This summary basically gives an idea of reactions to the scripts. At the end of this note I am including the actual survey responses, plus a posting by Chug Von Rospach at Sun that I grabbed from comp.sources.d. Since the survey responses total about 26Kb (577 lines), they should probably be put into the archives. Rich Baughman (rich@cfisun.cfi.com) gave a critique of the SunOS 4.0 script and documentation. If you haven't done that upgrade yet but are planning on it, I'd recommend reading through his comments. Most people were (surprise!) under-impressed with the scripts provided and thus did part or all of the work by hand. The general consensus seems to be reflected in this statement by Steven Tylock, tylock@cs.buffalo.edu: "A pain to use. Installation can not be done with 3'rd party equipment. ...I try to get away with dd'ing off the tapes, and installing myself. I don't have to worry about bugs in the procedure, only my own quirks..." Some used tar instead of dd, but the sentiments remain. A question by Rich Baughman, rich@cfi.com: "I am curious to find out if these problems are mostly us, or are real gurus also being frustrated?" Gurus don't get frustrated, they do it their way :-). Mitchell F. Wyle, wyle%ifi.ethz.ch@relay.cs.net, did give an interesting perspective though. "I find sun software no harder to run than DOS upgrades or DOS configuration. RSX-11 sysgen was a nightmare." Remind me not to buy a RSX-11 system :-). And yes, there are some lucky souls out there who "...ran the 3.4 upgrade scripts for our 3/52's (and our 3/160's too I think), with no problems." (Olaf Pors, op@bigfoot.acc.virginia.edu). Mr. Pors was the only person to report having absolutely no problems. He didn't say anything about diskful/diskless, nor if they also upgraded their file servers (assuming they have them). The other positive comments were similar to Steve Platt's (steve@mrc-apu.cam.ac.uk) "Anyway, it wasnt too bad, considering ... we were able to carry on almost immediately." I hope this has been enlightening. If not, please send constructive criticism to me. Thank you. [[ The complete collection of responses to the survey has been placed in the archives under "sun-spots" as "script.survey". It is 28199 bytes long. It can be retrieved via anonymous FTP from the host "titan.rice.edu" or via the archive server. For more information about the archive server, send a mail message containing the word "help" to the address "archive-server@rice.edu". --wnl ]] ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 5 Jul 88 09:20:16 EDT From: petemackay@lynx.northeastern.edu Subject: Comments and questions about Suntools under 4.0 I have recently installed SunOS 4.0 on our 3/110, and noticed that Suntools had been revised. I like the new menus, but they do take further wrist practice to master. I'm also adjusting to the new Mac-like confirmation windows - will a lawsuit follow? :-) One thing that keeps happening (a bug already?): After I select an option (such as split view in textedit or quit a tool), the pointer turns white and can't be easily seen! Has this been happening to anyone else? It's not easily proved because it's totally un-predictable and seemingly random. Any clues? Pete MacKay Internet: petemackay@lynx.northeastern.edu Analog Devices Phone: 461-4099 3 Technology Way Norwood, MA 02062 ------------------------------ Date: 4 Jul 88 20:55:05 GMT From: rutgers!sun1.cs.uh.edu!mkkam@handies.ucar.edu (Francis Kam) Subject: Sun IPC question Whenever I run pctool with pc0 enabled for the Sun IPC board on a 260, the system keeps receiving "level 2 interrupts" in such a way that it looks like it's dead (keep printing level 2 interrupt message). Also, IPC Rel 1.1 doesn't seem to work with subnetting. We're currently running OS 3.5. If anyone out there has experience in installing IPC and accessing it from a remote workstation, please give me some hints. Thank you. Francis Kam Computer Science Department Internet: mkkam@wael.cs.uh.edu University of Houston CSNET: mkkam@houston.csnet 4800 Calhoun Phone: (713)749-1748 Houston, TX 77004. ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 2 Jul 88 13:18:19 EDT From: "Mark Phillips (RD Goldman)" <mbp@sofya.umd.edu> Subject: graphical SunView panel editor? Does anyone have a program for interactively creating and editing SunView panels? I spend an enormous amount of time trying to get items positioned in my panels in a way that looks nice and is easy to use. It seems that this process could be streamlined by an interactive program which allows you to create and edit panel items with the mouse. It could also allow various panel and panel item attributes to be specified during the construction. The final output would be a file with the C code for generating the panel. Any ideas? Mark Phillips Department of Mathematics University of Maryland at College Park mbp%julia.umd.edu@eneevax.umn.edu ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 3 Jul 88 12:52:06 -0200 From: Yaakov Itzikowitz <yi@WISDOM.BITNET> Subject: Course schedule for SUN Training? Hi, Does anybody have the course schedule of SUN for Unix internals and device drive writing for the next 6-9 months, courses that will take place in the USA ? Thanks, Yaakov ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 5 Jul 88 11:04:05 +0200 From: unido!stollco!til@uunet.uu.net (tilgner) Subject: documentation for the Sun Macro Package tmac.sun? We are using troff with -ms macro set for our documentation purposes. Now I realised that SUN supplied a modified version -msun "The Sun Macro Package", including some useful stuff for generating table of contents, indexes etc. But, however, it is a hard job to analyze the code for finding out how to use it. Is there a documentation anywhere? Michael ------------------------------ Date: 5 Jul 88 00:45:17 GMT From: E.Wilkinson@massey.ac.nz (Edward Wilkinson) Subject: is the 386i fully source compatible with Sun-3s? The subject just about says it all! I've seen a lovely range of graphics goodies for the Sun-3 series of machines & am wondering whether these can be run on the Roadrunner. If not, are they easily convertable? Sorry if this has been asked before. Ed Wilkinson @ Computer Centre, Massey University, Palmerston North, NZ uucp: {uunet,watmath!cantuar}!vuwcomp!csvaxa!edward DTE: 530163000005 Janet/Greybook: E.Wilkinson@nz.ac.massey Phone: +64 63 69099 x8587 CSnet/ACSnet/Internet: E.Wilkinson@massey.ac.nz New Zealand = GMT+12 [[ The byte ordering is different between the two machines. And I am sure that there are other architectural differences. So the answer is "only if the program is well written". --wnl ]] ------------------------------ End of SUN-Spots Digest ***********************