Sun-Spots-Request@RICE.EDU (William LeFebvre) (05/09/88)
SUN-SPOTS DIGEST Sunday, 8 May 1988 Volume 6 : Issue 78 Today's Topics: Re: csh file completion bug Re: Looking for ypchfn Re: A Question about Shared memory Connecting SCSI disks to a 3/50? Big partitions don't work in 3.4 !!!! More fun for color fans, yet another colormap editor More about 8mm videotape for backups problem with VMS Fortran Resolved Problem with making selections of emphasized text in tty windows Looking for APL for Sun SIMULA on SUN 4? Appletalk on Sun MCP board ? Using icons? 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, 2 May 88 18:08:34 edt From: umix!oxtrap!rich@rutgers.edu (K. Richard Magill) To: mrd@sun.mcs.clarkson.edu Subject: Re: csh file completion bug If you get escape completion in your csh you aren't running csh at all. You are really running tcsh which is a set of modifications to the csh source. csh, as distributed does not do escape completion. Not having sources, MY csh does not expand. (thus we use ksh, but that's another story :-). [[ You are either running a old release of SunOS or you don't know how to enable the feature. Even 3.2 is *distributed* with a version of the csh that does file name completion when the csh variable "filec" is set. Try "set filec" and then "ls ^D" or "ls a-ESC". Or just look carefully at the manual page for csh(1) (search for "filec"). --wnl ]] ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 03 May 88 11:41:34 PDT From: Alan Stebbens <aks%mondas@hub.ucsb.edu> Subject: Re: Looking for ypchfn We have modified the "yppasswdd" server to add two additional "proc" entries: one for updating the GECOS field, and one to update the "shell" field. We have also modified the user programs "chfn" and "chsh" to use RPC to invoke the new "procs" in the server. Our modified "chfn" also uses an external description of the GECOS fields, allowing the format and number of subfields to change without requiring recompilation of the "chfn" program. Our "finger" uses this GECOS description file also. We made this change realizing (and hoping) that Sun OS 4.0 might do it differently (and correctly), using a better authentication mechanism (and perhaps, a more general dbm-map updating tool). It is an interim solution, as Sun had inadvertantly (at best) forgot to provide it. Since OS 4.0 is out (any day now), we are waiting to see what's been done in this area. If you would like more details on what we've done, please send mail. A related item is how Sun OS 4.0 handles "rwho" and "ruptime": the fact that the report packets are UDP-broadcast limits its utility to a cluster of machines between gateways. Usually, though, it is desired that "rwho" and "ruptime" report on larger domains of machines, spanning several gateways; the problem here is determining the boundary of interest. Using YP domains is not satisfactory, since it cannot be guaranteed (nor is it desireable) that all machines in a given administrative domain be running YP. We are currently investigating the feasability of using the Domain Name Server with "rwho" and "ruptime", with subdomains defining the boundary of interest. It would also be interesting to see if it could be made a general feature of all "rwho"'s, to respond to domain-based "rwho" queries. That is: to generate a query for users logged on, and machines' uptimes, within a given subdomain. If any others have done anything in this area, or are interested, let's compare notes. Alan Stebbens (aks@hub.ucsb.edu) ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 3 May 88 08:42:36 CDT From: vuse!ip1!hsc@uunet.uu.net (Hsuan Chang) Subject: Re: A Question about Shared memory We've augmented our shared memory to 4 MB for some purpose and the system works fine. I guess you know where to go in to make the change and how to build the kernel. Good luck. hsc%vuse.vanderbilt.edu ..!uunet!vuse!hsc ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 2 May 88 15:40:02 EDT From: peter jensen <jarsun1!jensen@relay.cs.net> Subject: Connecting SCSI disks to a 3/50? We are looking at connecting inexpensive SCSI drives such as the MAXTOR 4380S or CDC Wren IV to a SUN 3/50 Workstation. Most people I've talked to are selling an Emulex MD21 (SCSI to ESDI) controller with a comparable ESDI drive. However, I know of several people who have hooked up one of these SCSI drives directly to the SCSI port on the 3/50. I'm looking for more information on this: 1) General drive information and SCSI vs. ESDI: Who's using these drives? How do they perform? Has anyone had any problems with them? What are the issues between ESDI and SCSI? Any other drives anyone would recommend? Any to avoid? Why? 2) Hooking it up to the SUN 3/50: I'm really interested in hearing from people who have done this. Have you run into any compatibility problems? What's your configuration like? Has anyone daisy-chained two or more drives? Is there anything to look out for? Anyone not recommend this? We are currently running 3.5. Will 4.0 change anything? Thanks in advance! I will summarize any replies. Peter C. Jensen ...!brunix!jarsun1!jensen pcj@cs.brown.edu Jordan Apostal Ritter Associates ANSYS, ARIES, and Engineering Analysis Admin Bldg 7, Davisville RI 02854 (401) 884-3014 or (401) 294-4589 ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 3 May 88 14:56:02 EDT From: ajb%cornea.mitre.org@gateway.mitre.org (Alan J. Broder) Subject: Big partitions don't work in 3.4 !!!! We have solved the problem since posting the message excerpted below. The solution (and problem) turn out to be quite interesting and probably relevant to many other Sun sites. > We've just installed 4 Fuji-2372 disks on a Xylogics 451 controller > with an AVIV VME-bus adapter on our Sun-3/280. After formatting up the > disks, installing UNIX and reloading our dump tapes we discovered a > very nasty problem. The problem is that some programs will not run > anymore. Interestingly, if we make multiple copies of the same > executable file, some of them will run just fine. Others however > never even make it to main(), instead they report an EMT trap and dump > core. Yet cmp reports that there are no differences between the > executables that work and the executables that dump core. So, > apparently, the executable's position on the disk affects whether it > will run or not ! This problem can be reproduced consistently on each > of the 4 2372's. By the way, no disk errors are being reported. Well, we finally decided to go back to ground zero; we removed all the new hardware and reinstalled the original Super-Eagles (2361's) and the Xylogics 451, all of which we had obtained from Sun. When we made multiple copies of the same executable and ran them from the 2361's, we discovered the same problem !! A quick call to USA-4SUN, revealed that this is a known bug in 3.4 . Apparently we had partitioned our second 2361 drive (and our second, third, and fourth 2372's) with a single large partition to cover the whole disk. According to Sun, in 3.4 and before, any partition larger than about 512 Mbytes, may result in unpredictable behaviour when exec'ing programs from it. Apparently when a large program executes from disk, Unix sets up demand paging to the disk where the program resides. And in 3.4, the field which defines the offset into the disk partition for demand paging will only accomodate offsets up to 512 meg. This problem has been fixed (according to Sun) in 3.5 . So, in summary, if you must run large programs which are stored on partitions which are larger than 512 Meg, you MUST run 3.5 or suffer the consequences. Alan Broder ajb@mitre.arpa The MITRE Corporation (703)883-5614 ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 3 May 88 12:36:00 CDT From: vuse!ip1!hsc@uunet.uu.net (Hsuan Chang) Subject: More fun for color fans, yet another colormap editor As a color fan myself, I've built a window-mouse based color editor which was based on a half cooked version called "palettetool" provided to me from Sun (I still call it the same name). My version simulates an artist's palette where the mouse serves as a brush pan. (...a word from a fine arts drop-out: I know how a palette functions...) A few sliders are used to adjust the saturations for rgb's. The "artist" may assign a desired color to a region of entries of the colormap by brushing over those entries using the mouse, or s/he may dip the color and put it to a few selected colormap entries... Well, so much for the advertising. I'd be glad to share this product with everybody (with an on-line manual) if somebody would tell me how to make this contribution. I don't mean to start a competition with other guys. It is just that I am excited to know such a little thing also counts. H. Chang Image Processing Lab Computer Science Department, Vanderbilt University Box 1679, Station B, Nashville, Tn 37235 hsc%vuse.vanderbilt.edu ..!uunet!vuse!hsc [[ To submit source to the sun-spots archives, merely send it to the submission address, "sun-spots@rice.edu". If it is too large to include directly in a digest, I place it in the archives. Please include a brief description of what the software does, and package it in a shar file (or a series of shar files). --wnl ]] ------------------------------ Date: 3 May 88 23:54:42 GMT From: milano!sandel@tuvalu.sw.mcc.com (Charles Sandel) Subject: More about 8mm videotape for backups As a followup to my recent posting about using 8mm video-tape drives for backing up Suns, I have more information. In my original posting, I said that I liked the drive and it worked very well, but I was concerned about the tape medium itself and how well it would stand the test of time. Since then, I have talked with a representative from Exabyte about these concerns. The information he gave me was very encouraging. The advertised shelf life of 8mm video tape is 4 years, because that is how long that particular medium has existed. There is no way to perform accelerated tests on magnetic tape of any kind because you would have to vary temperature and humidity and when you do that, the backing tends to fall apart. The National Bureau of Standards recommends that accelerated tests on mag tape are useless. So, all that any manufacturer is willing to commit to is what their experience is, which in this case is 4 years maximum. The characteristics of mag tape that are measurable without accelerated tests indicate that it should be at least as good as regular 9-track mag tape, and probably much better. The coercivity ratings of metal particle tape are about 5x that of 9-track tape, which means that it is harder to erase, hence should also have longer shelf life. But what it boils down to is: no one knows for sure. The indications are that metal particle 8mm tape should be at least as reliable as ordinary 9-track magtapes, but the only real test is to put something on a shelf and wait. But I am encouraged. The technology looks promising and a 2 Gb tape drive can solve a lot of problems. The future also holds some interesting developments. On another front, R-DAT is an up-and-coming format. It looks like an R-DAT cassette will hold about 1 Gb of data. I can't see why anyone would bother with a 1 Gb medium when a 2 Gb (and maybe more?) is available and working. Sun is definitely taking a good look at 8mm videotape systems, as are other manufacturers. If you are interested in having 8mm videotape be a standard for tape backup, I suggest you let Sun know of your desires. Charles Charles Sandel arpa: sandel@mcc.com uucp: *!ut-sally!im4u!milano!sandel ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 3 May 88 08:58:29 PDT From: danq%sag4.ssl.Berkeley.EDU@jade.berkeley.edu (Daniel Quinlan) Subject: problem with VMS Fortran Resolved I posted a complaint about obtaining VMS Fortran for Sun 2 recently. Sun-Spots was very effective in clearing up the problem. I got mail from Dave Hough at Sun, who personally hand delivered a copy of the release. I'm happy with the resolution of the problem, and I appreciate the personal attention from people at Sun. Daniel Quinlan Space Sciences Laboratory UC Berkeley [[ The power of the network. Amazing, isn't it? --wnl ]] ------------------------------ Date: 3 May 88 15:19:13 GMT From: roy%phri@uunet.uu.net (Roy Smith) Subject: Problem with making selections of emphasized text in tty windows I'm running suntools on a 3/50 under SunOS-3.2. If I double-click on some emphasized text in a tty window, I can't select a word. To be more specific, I was just running emacs in a shelltool (i.e. ttysw) window. After quitting emacs, I was left with the emphasized mode line near the bottom of the window: EMACS (Fundamental Fill) HirshonFsmPreprint: HirshonFsmPreprint --100%-- * The next thing I wanted to do was "ptroff -me HirshonFsmPreprint" and to get the filename, I wanted to just double-left-click to select HirshonFsmPreprint from the left-over mode line then do "Put, then Get". When I do the double-click on, for example, the "H" in the first "HirshonFsmPreprint", I select "ill) Hi". Double-click on any of those characters gets me the same selection. Double-clicking on either the "P" or the "r" after it gets me just that one letter, either the "e" or "p" following that gets "ep", the next "r" get just that one letter, and anywhere in the following "int: Hi" gets all that. It would appear that there are some magic cookies burried in the text which screws up the parsing of the line into words. Tripple-clicking anywhere in the line does get me the whole line and left-click on "H" followed by middle-click on the "t" before the ":" does get me "HirshonFsmPreprint" as it should. For what it's worth, I use: /Tty/Bold_style "Offset_X_and_Y_and_XY" in my .defaults file. Presumably this is a bug in the suntools library? Roy Smith, System Administrator Public Health Research Institute 455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016 {allegra,philabs,cmcl2,rutgers}!phri!roy -or- phri!roy@uunet.uu.net ------------------------------ Date: 3 May 88 19:31:41 GMT From: quirk@hubcap.clemson.edu (Christine Reynolds,2639,G09J) Subject: Looking for APL for Sun I'm looking for an APL (preferably public domain) that will run on a Sun 3. Any help would be appreciated. Chris Reynolds uucp: ... !gatech!hubcap!quirk CS Dept, Clemson University inet: quirk@hubcap.clemson.edu phone: (803)656-{2639,3444} ARPA: QUIRK@TECNET-CLEMSON.ARPA ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 3 May 88 09:18 N From: <PETIT@HGRRUG5.BITNET> Subject: SIMULA on SUN 4? Does anyone kwon if there is a SIMULA compiler available for the SUN 4 ? We have plan to move from VAX to SUN for our students. Thanks for any informations, Marc (EARN/BITNET address : PETIT@HGRRUG5) ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 2 May 88 11:27:30 MET DST From: Toerless Eckert <faui10!eckert@sun.com> Subject: Appletalk on Sun MCP board ? Is it possible to run Appletalk directly on a Sun 3/160 with Sun's Multiprotocol Communication Processor? >From the Specification of the board it seems possible. The board supports the speed ( 230.4kbps) and the link layer protocoll ( SLDC). Are there any Products available, which implement Appleshare or TOPS on the Sun, using this hardware configuration ? Toerless Eckert ------------------------------ Date: 3 May 88 09:27:47 EDT (Tue) From: dck@mtunn.att.com (David Kwong) Subject: Using icons? Pardon my elementary question ... How do I use the icons in that icon issue? I am running SunOS 3.2 on SUN-4's. Thanks. D. C. Kwong AT&T mtune!mtunn!dck [[ Since there might be others out there with the same question, I will answer it here. Actually, reading the "suntools" manual page will reveal the answer, but you must be patient and go through most of the entry before finding the section entitled "Generic Tool Arguments". There we find out that most tools should recognize the argument "-WI icon-image". A text file, such as those distributed through sun-spots, is accceptable files for the "-WI" argument. --wnl ]] ------------------------------ End of SUN-Spots Digest ***********************