Sun-Spots-Request@RICE.EDU (William LeFebvre) (07/07/88)
SUN-SPOTS DIGEST Thursday, 7 July 1988 Volume 6 : Issue 133 Today's Topics: Educational source licenses prohibit commercial development Poor 4.0 performance Ciprico Disk Controllers and SunOS 4.0 4.0 Sun logo binder spine labels tape switch sources touchup - rasfilter8to1 PC-NFS problems iebark reset crashes large-screen/projection monitors? VITec anyone? experience with array processors? MAX Groups Question 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: Mon, 27 Jun 88 20:56:11 PDT From: hoptoad.UUCP!gnu@cgl.ucsf.edu (John Gilmore) Subject: Educational source licenses prohibit commercial development Tait Cyrus of UNM asked whether he can use a University computer to write a proprietary software package and then later charge money for it. If the University computer has an Educational Unix license, the answer is no. The license requires that any software developed on the machine be made available to anyone else for a copying cost (subject to license limitations, e.g. if you used AT&T code in your product, recipients must also have an AT&T license). This is not a bad deal, considering that universities get full Unix source for $1K total. The idea is that you are doing education or research. If you are doing development of commercial applications, you'd better pay the $80K or whatever it now costs for a commercial Unix source license. I would be interested in getting "tips" on any commercially sold software that was developed on University machines. I'm always looking for good publicly distributable software to put on SUG tapes :-). Several universities, including U of British Columbia and UC Berkeley, have bought commercial Unix licenses for one of their machines, and they claim to be doing all their commercial development on those machines (X.25 at UBC, and VorTeX and other things at UCB). In the case of Berkeley I doubt it's true -- the machine is "violet.berkeley.edu" and it's networked to all the educationally licensed Suns on peoples' desks, where they are really doing the work. But just having the machine there makes it harder to prove that they're breaking the license. You can verify this information either by reading your Unix license (your company or University promised that you would abide by it if you have access to the Unix machine, so it would help if you'd read it!) or by calling AT&T Unix Licensing at +1 800 828 UNIX. (Sorry, I don't know the number if area code 800 doesn't work from your country.) John Gilmore [[ But people doing development work under a standard (binary) Sun license are okay, because Sun has a binary redistribution license from AT&T. Your summary only applies to an educational Unix source license from AT&T. At least, this is my limited understanding of the situation. By the way, VorTeX's cost is low enough to be considered just a copying fee (under $300). However, it is not freely redistributable. --wnl ]] ------------------------------ Date: 28 Jun 88 02:08:26 GMT From: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu (Charles Hedrick) Subject: Poor 4.0 performance We're just now bringing up 4.0 on some test machines. The first person whose workstation moved to 4.0 threatened to kill me. Suntools is taking 5 to 7 minutes to start for him. (This is on a 2/50 with 4 MB.) So we brought up a second machine located right next to a machine still running 3.2 (both 4 MB 2/50's - we have bigger machines, but we decided to start with the machines that were most likely to cause trouble). We found the following: starting up suntools, and any tool under suntools - 4.0 is incredibly slow starting up Common Lisp or Emacs under suntools - 4.0 is very slow starting up Common Lisp outside suntools - 4.0 is slightly faster starting up X with a couple of windows - 4.0 is slightly faster Common Lisp and X were both built under 3.x, and thus are static linked. So now the question is: is there something about 4.0 that makes suntools lose, or is it the new version of suntools itself? So the next experiment was to NFS mount our 3.2 file server, and chroot to it. Thus I was running entirely 3.2 software on a 4.0 kernel. This configuration now won every test again 3.2, including starting suntools, starting Common Lisp under suntools, and starting emacs under suntools. Thus it appears that the real lose is not the 4.0 kernel, but either the 4.0 version of suntools or something about the way it is loaded (e.g. dynamic loading). More about this later. I wanted to post results before we've had a chance to look at them very much so as to get other people looking in the same direction. It appears to be wrong to say that 4.0 in general is slow or a memory hog, as some have been saying. If necessary, I am perfectly willing to move to 4.0 but use the old suntools, disable dynamic linking, or whatever else turns out to be necessary to get reasonable performance on 4MB systems. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 28 Jun 88 08:57:06 -0400 From: Dan Grim <grim@udel.edu> Subject: Ciprico Disk Controllers and SunOS 4.0 I have learned from Aviv Corp., who we have bought Ciprico controllers from, and confirmed with Ciprico, that Sun has decided not to allow Ciprico, and presumably other controller vendors, access to boot-level code necessary to allow booting from Ciprico attached disks. This has been possible previously up through SunOS 3.5 but is being disallowed by Sun as of release 4.0 THIS IS A VERY DISTURBING TURN OF EVENTS! We have stopped buying equipment from Digital Equipment Corp. due to similar restrictions, and Sun is quite likely to push us into considering other vendors who may be more accomodating. This is quite unfortunate coming from a company which promotes so-called "open architecture." By way of background, we purchased the Ciprico 3220 controller specifically to attach CDC 9720-1230 disk drives which transfer data at 24 MHz. Sun was not at the time, and may not yet be, selling a controller capable of supporting drives of that speed. If the Xylogics 7053 had been available we might well have purchased it, but we were certainly not going to buy Sun's 900 MB disk for around $14,500 (with discount) when we could buy the CDC 1.2 GB drives for about 9,500! Besides, the CDC drives are half the physical size of the Sun-supplied drives. If Sun is determined to be like DEC, who in turn seems to want to be like IBM, I guess we'll have to learn to live with that, but it does seem like a shame! Dan Grim Manager, EE/CIS Research Computer Lab University of Delaware ------------------------------ Date: 27 Jun 88 20:09:55 GMT From: ulowell!applix!jim@eddie.mit.edu (Jim Morton) Subject: 4.0 Sun logo binder spine labels I have taken the previous posting of the Sun logo binder spine labels for the SunOS documentation and modified them for 4.0, as well as cleaning up the fonts and logo. This postscript file contains labels for the entire 4.0 "Docubox" documentation set, which comes out to 15 2-inch binder manuals. You can mail me a request for this file if it doesn't make it into the archives. Jim Morton, APPLiX Inc., Westboro, MA UUCP: ...harvard!m2c!applix!jim jim@applix.m2c.org [[ It is 6107 bytes and it has been placed in the archives as "sun-source/sun4.0labels.ps". It can be retrieved via anonymous FTP from the host "titan.rice.edu" or via the archive server with the request "send sun-source sun4.0labels.ps". 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, 28 Jun 88 10:49:57 mdt From: era@scdpyr.ucar.edu (Ed Arnold) Subject: tape switch sources Thanks to the sun-spots readers who responded to my recent inquiry about sources for a tape switch for Pertec-interface drives. For anyone who may be interested (i.e. who doesn't like w-a-i-t-i-n-g for dumps over ethernet, and can't afford to buy a tape drive for every system), the sources are listed below. Aviv and Iverson appear to be the major sources; the rest either weren't reachable by phone, or didn't seem terribly interested in selling a product. Don't bother to ask your Sun rep about this equipment, because Sun doesn't sell it (our rep had never heard of such a thing). Should you decide to buy one, however, be sure to let your Sun rep know that you had to go elsewhere. Aviv Inc., Woburn, MA; 617-933-1165 Iverson Inc., San Anselmo, CA; 415-459-5665 Eakins Associates, Mtn View, CA; 415-969-5109 Gafford Technology, CA; 415-499-1673 South Hills Electronics, PA; 800-245-6215 (Bob Karabinos) Response Computer Technology, Fremont, CA; 415-490-3851 Ed Arnold * NCAR (Nat'l Center for Atmospheric Research) * Mesa Lab PO Box 3000 * Boulder, CO 80307-3000 * 303-497-1253 era@ncar.ucar.edu (128.117.64.4) * {ames,gatech,noao,...}!ncar!era ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 28 Jun 88 10:06:56 EDT From: ufnmr!ufnmr_1!gareth@bikini.cis.ufl.edu (Gareth J. Barker) Subject: touchup - rasfilter8to1 I've just picked up a copy of 'touchup' from the archives and am very impressed, although I find the '-n' option essential for working on our color 3/110. I have a problem, however, with printing out the final results. We have a non-postscript HP LaserJet II so I can't use pssun or similar on the rasterfile, so I intended to use 'prraster' (also from the archives). This requires running the rasterfile through 'rasfilter8to1 (1)' to strip it down to one bit deep. When run on a 'touchup' rasterfile, 'rasfilter8to1' complains about an "incorrect ras_maptype". An octal dump of the rasterfile header shows a ras_maptype of 0 (ie RMT_NONE), and a ras_maplength of 0. (RMT_NONE is described as 'Sun supported' in '/usr/include/rasterfile.h', but I suspect that 'rasfilter8to1' is wanting RMT_RAW, which is 'Sun registered'). Has anyone out there overcome this problem? Would it be easier to modify touchup to generate a different maptype, or to write something to convert the rasterfile? Any help would be appreciated, Gareth J. Barker, University of Florida, Department of Radiology. BITNET : GJBARKER@UFFSC.BITNET INTERNET : ufnmr!gareth@BIKINI.CIS.UFL.EDU UUCP : ...gatech!uflorida!ufnmr!gareth ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 27 Jun 88 14:42:01 PDT From: wolf%ssyx.UCSC.EDU@ucscc.ucsc.edu (Mike Wolf) Subject: PC-NFS problems I've been using Sun's PC-NFS package on a PS/2 model 30. I've had a couple problems with the software. 1) The PC-NFS routines won't let you bind two sockets to the same port number, even if they are in different domains. i.e. you can't have a TCP and a UDP socket bound to the same port. BSD sockets will let you do this. In fact, the port-mapper for RPC requires both a TCP and a UDP socket bound to port 111. 2) The PC-NFS software intercepts all incoming messages on port 2049. Port 2049 is the port an NFS server must be listening on. Also, PCNFS doesn't give an EADDRINUSE error when a socket is bound to that port. I don't understand why Sun chose to have the NFS client bind to port 2049. Port 2049 is only necessary for a NFS server. In addition, if the client uses port 2049, it is impossible to have both an NFS client and server running. Has anyone else run into these problems? If so, I'd be interested in hearing your solutions. -- Michael Wolf ARPA: wolf@ssyx.ucsc.edu UUCP: ...ucbvax!ucscc!ssyx!wolf ------------------------------ Date: 28 Jun 88 00:14:28 GMT From: mkhaw@teknowledge-vaxc.arpa (Mike Khaw) Subject: iebark reset crashes Since about 3 weeks ago, nearly all of our several 3/110s keep crashing with ie0: iebark reset ie0: panic: iexmitdone: tbds out of sync They have boot PROMs at different rev. levels; some are running SunOS 3.4, some 3.5. Some have 8 Mbytes of Sun memory, others have 4 meg. Sun and 12 meg. Clearpoint. 3 are located near each other on the main ethernet cable, while others are some distance away and 1 is even on the other side of an ethernet bridge. We also have a lone 3/75 that's crashing with the same problem; a 3/110 that *hasn't* had the problem (it's close to the 3 crashing ethernet neighbors); and a 3/160 server that *doesn't* have this problem. That's all the Suns with ie0 interfaces. None of our 3/50s or 3/60s are affected (they have le0 interfaces). I think we can rule out the Clearpoint memory as a contributing cause. Sun support doesn't seem to know what the cause might be. They even tried swapping a CPU board on one of the crashing 110s with no effect. None of our other machines on our ethernet is experiencing any network related problems. Anyone have a clue what's going on? Thanks, Mike Khaw internet: mkhaw@teknowledge.arpa uucp: {uunet|sun|ucbvax|decwrl|uw-beaver}!mkhaw%teknowledge-vaxc.arpa hardcopy: Teknowledge Inc, 1850 Embarcadero Rd, POB 10119, Palo Alto, CA 94303 ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 27 Jun 88 16:23:51 PDT From: wrs!jerry@sun.com (Jerry Fiddler) Subject: large-screen/projection monitors? I'm looking for a Sun-compatible monochrome large-screen monitor or projection video system to use at trade shows for demonstrations. The biggest monitor I've found is a 25" available from Moniterm. Does anyone know of anything larger, or of a reasonably priced video projector? Also, will I have any video degradation problem connecting the new monitor in parallel with the existing monitor? I want them showing exactly the same image. Jerry Fiddler Wind River Systems sun!wrs!jerry ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 28 Jun 03:57:54 1988 From: ihnp4!sys1!pat (Patrick Dryden) Subject: VITec anyone? Just a query to see if you've heard about the VITec immage-processing system for Sun stations. This north-Dallas company began shipping product in February after two years designing their parallel image-processor (PIP) chip and Image Display List-Processing (IDLS) software. The three-board subsystem fits inside the Sun -- not in an external box like Pixar -- and delivers 172 MIPS worth of interactive image-processing power. The VITec runs under UNIX(r) and X Windows with C toolkit and other goodies for OEMs/developers. I've seen some nifty sample applications in aerial reconnaisance, color separation for electronic publishing, lots more. If you would like to get complete information for sun-spots, I'll hunt up their phone or ask them to mail a packet to you. Full name = Visual Information Technology in Plano, TX. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 28 Jun 88 10:58:34 EDT From: Ned Danieley <ndd@sunbar.mc.duke.edu> Subject: experience with array processors? Does anyone have any experience using an array processor with a Sun 3 (or Sun 4)? Sky Computers is advertising their Warrior II as running at up to 26 MFLOPS and selling for $14900. Would this be a reasonable addition to a 4/110? Any advice or comments would be welcome. Ned Danieley (ndd@sunbar.mc.duke.edu) Basic Arrhythmia Laboratory Box 3140, Duke University Medical Center Durham, NC 27710 (919) 684-6807 or 684-6942 ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 28 Jun 88 08:32:34 PDT From: Steve Blair <spar!ascway!scb@decwrl.dec.com> Subject: MAX Groups Question I have to work within multiple groups and have recently run into a problem. When I am in more than 6 groups, I get the following: (after logging-in) init:too many groups prompt% Is there a hack I can install to make it a larger number? I really need to be in these multiple groups. ADB hacker instructions no problem. Please send the adb fix to the file(/etc/init(?)) directly to me! Steve Blair Unix System Administrator Austin Systems Center Schlumberger Well Services uucp:{backbone}!sun!decwrl!spar!ascway!scb internet: spar!ascway!scb@decwrl.dec.com [[ No way. The upper bound is determined by an array in the user structure that is fixed at 8 entries. Impossible to fix in a binary, hard to fix in the source. --wnl ]] ------------------------------ End of SUN-Spots Digest ***********************