Sun-Spots-Request@RICE.EDU (Vicky Riffle) (05/29/87)
SUN-SPOTS DIGEST Wednesday, 27 May 1987 Volume 5 : Issue 16
Today's Topics:
Re: Generating Sun-2 Binaries on a Sun-3
mouse problems on SUN-3 (summary of replies)
Re: Looking for a Visicalc clone?
Re: Putting 3 or 4 drives on a Xylogics 450
Re: FORTRAN I/O in mixed language environment?
Re: Tape drives for Sun?
Re: IP fragmentation, and how to avoid it
Sun and Philips joint project on CD-I authoring (Sun press release - very long)
getting sun to release a better uucp
4.3 UUCP availability
new version of tcpdump available
WARNING: electrical shorting problem in Sun 3 SCSI controller (FIX)
Results of my "Emacs survey"
'textedit' tool?
RCS for the Sun?
Sun IPC problems?
Request for sendmail.cf which works with subdomain style hostnames?
kermit?
Public Domain INGRES on SUNs?
taking system down for dumps other than level 0?
query on dump to sun scsi tape?
Sun OS on Vaxen?
SUN 3/140S and SMD disks
Metafont on Sun-3, anyone?
funny filename completion (ls ~username fails)?
SCSI inquiry?
Undocumented le0: Messages?
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 19 May 87 09:37:14 EDT
From: ucbcad!ames!seismo!rochester!srs!lee@ucbvax.berkeley.edu (Lee Hasiuk)
Subject: Re: Generating Sun-2 Binaries on a Sun-3
The easiest way that we've found to generate Sun-2 binaries on Sun-3's (two
earlier suggestions appearing in this group woldn't work -- both neglected
to mention the files /lib/crt0.o and /lib/Fcrt1.o which are linked as the
entry point in your program) is as follows (on the file server):
1) mkdir /usr.MC68010/arch/10 /usr.MC68010/arch/20
2) mkdir /usr.MC68020/arch/10 /usr.MC68020/arch/20
3) cp /pub.MC68010/lib/*.{o,a} /usr.MC68010/arch/10
4) cp /pub.MC68010/lib/*.{o,a} /usr.MC68020/arch/10
5) cp /pub.MC68020/lib/*.{o,a} /usr.MC68010/arch/20
6) cp /pub.MC68020/lib/*.{o,a} /usr.MC68020/arch/20
To create a Sun-2 binary on a Sun-3, link with the following flags to cc:
-Qpath /usr/arch/10 -L/usr/arch/10
To create a Sun-3 binary on a Sun-2, use:
-Qpath /usr/arch/20 -L/usr/arch/20
Unfortunately, if you '-l' any additional system libraries, you will end up with
the wrong executable again. To bypass this, either use '-L/usr.MC680X0/lib'
(change X accordingly to 1 or 2) or simply overwrite the files in
/usr.MC68020/lib with those in /usr.MC68010/lib.
It's interesting to note that cc, when you use the -mc flag for a machine
which is of a type other than what you're on, sets an environment variable
called 'VIRTUAL_ROOT' to '/usr/arch/-mc680X0:' (X is opposite of what
you're on). I have not been able to get 'ld' to take advantage of this.
Perhaps someone with source could tell us how it's used?
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 21 May 87 12:39 CST
From: KUSALIK%SASK.BITNET@wiscvm.wisc.edu (Tony Kusalik)
Subject: mouse problems on SUN-3 (summary of replies)
>In reply to the person who complained about the 3/50 mouse getting
>confused.
Well, that was me .....
First of all, thank you to all those who chose to reply. It seems that
there are MANY sites out there experiencing the same problem (maybe someone
at SUN should take notice .....)
The problem apparently stems from static electricity. A simple experiment
in our lab tended to confirmed this. However, there are complicating factors,
as one workstation may be much more susceptable than another.
A number of respondents indicated that the Mouse Systems documentation
says unplugging/replugging "resets" the mouse and that there is
no harm in doing so. However, this was usually accompanied by a cautionary
note that the mouse plug is fragile and may suffer from the wear.
People at SUN did not prove very helpful as to why both rebooting the system
and unplugging/replugging the mouse fix the problem.
We have decided to attack the problem by grounding the tablet.
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 20 May 87 08:42:00
From: edelheit%ernie.mitre.org@gateway.mitre.org (Jeff Edelheit)
Subject: Re: Looking for a Visicalc clone?
John - Have you looked at Q-Calc? Quality Software has two versions of it,
one is a Lotus workalike.
Jeff Edelheit (edelheit@mitre-gateway.arpa)
The MITRE Corporation, 7525 Colshire Drive
McLean, VA 22102 (703) 883-7586
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 20 May 87 08:14:59
From: rlb@riacs.edu (Bob Brown)
Subject: Re: Putting 3 or 4 drives on a Xylogics 450
We, too have put three drives on a Xylogics 450 controller and, after a
couple of weeks, have had no problems (Sun OS 3.3). The only catch is,
though, that the mini-root kernel and genvmunix are not configured for
more than two drives per controller. Therefore, if you want to use
"setup" to create ND partitions on that third disk, you need to borrow a
second controller from somewhere and strap it as xyc1 and attach the
third drive directly to it. Another alternative, if you don't have a
spare controller, is to tar in adb from the distribution tape to the
miniroot and then use it to modify the third entry in mbdinit[] and change
the ctlr field to zero and the slave field to 2 and reboot. Luckily, we
did not have to do this.
Bob Brown
RIACS/NASA Ames
----------
------------------------------
Date: 21 May 87 16:51 EST
From: montnaro%sprite.tcpip@ge-crd.arpa (Skip Montnaro)
Subject: Re: FORTRAN I/O in mixed language environment?
I would have replied to Simon Barnes directly, but what an awful address! No
hope of that puppy getting through.
Simon writes:
>We would like to call FORTRAN routines (for which we do not have source)
>from a main program written in another language, which could be C, but
>happens to be Ada. The problem is that FORTRAN I/O referencing logical
>units 5 and 6 is directed under these circumstances to the files
>fort.5 and fort.6 instead of standard input and standard output.
>
>How can we arrange for FORTRAN I/O to be directed to standard input/output,
>where it belongs? Note that standard output does not necessarily mean
>the terminal, /dev/tty.
We ran into similar, although not identical, problems when we called
Template graphics routines written in FORTRAN from a C application. We
basically had several hurdles to overcome:
1. We absolutely HAD to have a FORTRAN main program. We never did
investigate fully whether or not there was some FORTRAN I/O initialization
routine that needed to be called. It was easier to write main.f, and dummy
up argc and argv for our real C main program. This may solve your problem
Simon. (If you send me what looks like a usable electronic address, I'll
send you the code; it's not too big.)
2. All C strings had to be malloc'd to insure that they didn't begin on byte
boundaries, since Template declares all of its formal arguments as either
intergers or reals and therefore does longword accesses to all arguments.
Attempts at longword addressing in the 68010 (and 020? this was before we
had any of the new critters) on byte or word boundaries causes a bus error.
3. We had some trouble with floats being passed as doubles. -fsingle (had we
known about it, or if it existed at the time) would have probably worked. We
hacked a different way around it.
Hope this helps.
--
--
Skip| ARPA: montanaro@ge-crd.arpa
Montanaro| UUCP: montanaro@desdemona.steinmetz.ge.com
(518)387-7312| GE DECnet: advax::"montanaro@desdemona.steinmetz.ge.com"
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 21 May 87 13:05:07 PDT
From: jeff@tc.fluke.com (Jeff Stearns)
Subject: Re: Tape drives for Sun?
> Date: Fri, 15 May 87 21:01:02 EDT
> From: km@emory.arpa (Ken Mandelberg)
> Subject: Tape drives for Sun?
>
> How good is Suns 6250bpi tape drive? Does a Sun3 make it
> stream on dumps?
>
> Are there much better outside alternatives for the same cost?
On a Sun-3/280 (with Super Eagles on a Xylogics 451 disk controller), the
6250bpi tape drive does NOT stream during /etc/dump. This is under release 3.3.
/etc/dump achieves an effective throughput of 9M/minute to the tape drive.
You can give yourself a significant performance boost by installing the
4.3BSD version of dump (it uses a ring of processes to triple-buffer the data).
Throughput will nearly double to 16M/minute. The drive still doesn't stream,
but appears to come within five percent or so.
To run 4.3BSD dump on a Sun, you'll need to make two very minor changes to
the source code:
- if you use rdump, comment out the call
to setsockopt(SOL_SOCKET, SO_SENDBUF, ...);
- if you're running a release prior to 3.x, change SIGUSR1 to some
other (defined & unused) signal such as SIGXFSZ
--
Jeff Stearns 206-356-5064 new: jeff@tc.fluke.COM
John Fluke Mfg. Co. old: uw-beaver!fluke!jeff
P.O. Box C9090 Everett WA 98206 or: allegra!fluke!jeff
------------------------------
Date: 20 May 87 18:39:39 GMT
From: dplatt@teknowledge-vaxc.arpa (Dave Platt)
Subject: Re: IP fragmentation, and how to avoid it
About two weeks ago I posted a query concerning an IP-fragmentation
problem that I had encountered on my Sun workstation. I've received a
really astounding amount of assistance from folks on the net, and have
been able to zap the problem. Several people have asked me to
summarize my findings and the answers I received from informed
netfolks... so, here goes.
- The original symptom of the problem was that SMTP connections would
hang, and then abort with a network-read timeout, while sending
large messages to a few hosts on the Internet. Other hosts
(including those of the same type as the affected systems) were not
affected.
- Several people suggested that I check to ensure that my Ethernet
interface was configured with the -trailers option (it is).
- The problem was triggered by the fact that the MTU of my Sun's
Ethernet interface (1500 bytes) was less than the MTU of our ARPANET
gateway's IMP interface (1006 bytes). This situation caused the
TCP/IP packets sent by my Sun to be fragmented as they passed
through the gateway.
- The fragmented packets would occasionally fail to be reassembled
upon reception. Some hosts apparently don't implement IP-packet
reassembly (or don't do it reliably). Also, I'm told that there is
a bug in BSD 4.2 UNIX (and possibly in 4.3 as well) that prevents
BSD systems from successfully fragmenting an already-fragmented IP
packet. Thus, if a 1006-byte fragment from our net's gateway had to
be refragmented to fit within the MTU of the destination host's
network, the new fragments would be malformed and could not be
successfully reassembled.
- One method for working around the problem is to reduce the Sun's
Ethernet MTU to <= 1006 bytes, so that our gateway won't have to
fragment the packets. I was able to locate the constant 1500 in the
"ether_attach()" function in /vmunix, and patch it down to 1000
bytes with adb; booting with the patched /vmunix resolved the
problem. Charles Hedrick posted the source for a small program that
can change the MTU of the interface "on the fly", and it also works
like a charm; it's the method I'm now using.
Reducing the Ethernet MTU increases the number of packets needed to
complete NFS RPCs, and thus increases the overhead; NFS continues
to work just fine. I've been warned that decreasing the MTU will
probably break ND, but as I don't use it I don't really care.
- Another method for fixing the problem is persuading TCP to use a
smaller segment size, so that the packets that it sends will not
exceed the 1006-byte limit. I tried patching the 1024-byte MSS in
tcp_output() to a smaller size (512 bytes), but this did not appear
to work. I'm not sure why, as I have no sources for the SunOS 3.2
version of BSD 4.2 TCP.
Many people have pointed out that BSD 4.3 TCP makes a better choice
of MSS, based on the MTU of the interface and on whether the packets
will be routed through a gateway (a 512-byte MSS is used if the
packets are sent to any non-local destination). The BSD 4.3
enhancements have been incorporated into SunOS 3.4, which is due to
be shipped Real Soon Now according to our Sun sales-rep. I FTP'ed
the BSD 4.3 source for TCP from seismo (thanks, rick!) and can see
the additional logic; I haven't tried to retrofit the new TCP into
SunOS 3.2 or patch in equivalent code due to lack of time and lack
of urgency.
So... I've got a good workaround for the problem (reducing the MTU),
and the problem will go away once I install SunOS 3.4 with the BSD 4.3
enhancements to TCP. Happy ending.
MANY thanks to all of the people on the net who have sent suggestions,
hints, and reports of similar problems elsewhere!
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 20 May 87 18:54:07 PDT
From: hoptoad.UUCP!gnu@cgl.ucsf.edu (John Gilmore)
Subject: Sun and Philips joint project on CD-I authoring (Sun press release)
I'm curious whether the Sun-Spots readership is interested in getting
copies of Sun press releases. I don't know whether Sun is willing to
release them to the "electronic press" as opposed to the hardcopy press
anyway. But if you want Sun press releases in Sun-spots, or you don't
want Sun press releases in Sun-spots, send mail to sun-spots-request@rice.edu
and say so. Vicky can tally the responses and let us know in a future digest.
Personally I think it's a good idea. The media just takes these press
releases and deletes information from them and distorts or misunderstands
it sometimes. We technical Sun customers would do better with the raw
information, and we don't all have the time to follow the computer magazines
looking for things about Sun.
PHILIPS AND SUN ANNOUNCE COOPERATION
Joint Project to Develop Integrated CD-I and Workstation Technologies
SEATTLE, WA -- March 3, 1987 -- Sun Microsystems, Inc., and Philips, the
Dutch electronics multinational, have announced plans to cooperate on the
development of a new system, known as a multi-media authoring system, based
upon the integration of Sun workstation and Compact Disc Interactive (CD-I)
technologies.
This joint effort is the first of its kind and was announced today at the
annual Microsoft CD ROM conference in Seattle to alert third-party
software developers to this new combination of workstation and optical disc
technologies.
CD-I is a recent development evolving from Compact Disc Digital Audio
technology, and has the capability to handle a unique combination of
audio, video, data, and text in an interactive format.
Authoring systems are collections of hardware, system utilities and software
tools which enable CD-I application developers to design, assemble and test
interactive, multi-media CD-I applications in entertainment, education, and
information, both for consumer and institutional markets.
The two companies have formed the Sun-Philips New Media Group, staffed by a
team of engineers from both companies, reporting to Wayne Rosing, vice
president of high-end engineering at Sun Microsystems, and located at Sun
headquarters in Mountain View, California. The group has already started
early stage development of authoring systems based on Sun workstations with
an open system architecture to stimulate the early development of a wide
variety of software tools.
"Philips brings to the partnership unparalleled knowledge in the area of
optical technology," observed Scott McNealy, president and chief executive
officer at Sun Microsystems. "The partnership will benefit from both the
worldwide software infrastructure for CD-I established by Philips, and
Philips' worldwide reputation in consumer electronics markets", he added.
"Sun offers a proven, and powerful hardware and software platform and a
commitment to open systems technology ideally suited for building CD-I
authoring systems," said David C. Geest, senior managing director and
chairman of Philips International, Corporate Group Home Interactive Systems.
According to Sun's Wayne Rosing, "Sun can capitalize on its leading edge in
hardware and software technologies, such as database, expert systems and
networking, and integrate those with CD-I technologies to create totally new
interactive, multi-media oriented application software."
Founded in 1982, Sun Microsystems has sold more than 30,000 workstations and
board-level products worldwide to OEMs and technical end-users in the
computer-aided design, electronic publishing, factory automation, software
engineering, artificial intelligence and financial services markets. Sun
is traded in the National Market System under the symbol SUNW.
_______
PRESS CONTACTS:
Carol Broadbent
Sun Microsystems Press Relations
415/691-7737
Joop Witvoet
Philips Corporate Group Home Interactive Systems
Eindhoven, The Netherlands
31-40-756333
_______
Questions and Answers
re: Joint Development Agreement between Sun and Philips
for Compact Disc Interactive (CD-I) Authoring Systems.
For more info, contact:
Steve MacKay
Sun New Media Workstations
(415) 691-7537
What are Sun and Philips agreeing to do?
There is both a short term commitment and a long term expectation
to this agreement.
The commitment is for Sun and Philips to study the technology for CD-I
Authoring Systems. We will draft technical specifications for a Sun-based
CD-I Authoring System. This initial agreement does not commit either Sun or
Philips to product development. This is a research study agreement only.
The longer term expectation is that if the study phase proves the technical
and business feasibility of CD-I Authoring, then we will develop and
eventually market Sun-based CD-I authoring systems. Any product
announcements are at least a year in the future. The details of future
cooperation or product development is the subject of ongoing discussions
between Philips and Sun management.
Sun and Philips have formed the New Media Group, located in Mountain View,
reporting to Wayne Rosing, Sun's VP of high-end engineering. The overall
direction of the project is controlled by a four member Project Review Team,
with senior executives of both Sun and Philips.
Who are we dealing with?
N.V. Philips is a worldwide electronics company with sales in excess of
$25B. Philips is the largest electronics company in Europe, and one of
the five largest in the world, with more than 350,000 employees, and more
than 40,000 people in the Philips Research Labs alone.
Philips markets a wide range of products: consumer electronics,
telecommunications equipment, semiconductors, etc. In North America,
Philips is known via brand names such as Magnavox, Philco, Norelco and
Signetics.
The Philips Corporate Group Home Interactive Systems (HIS) is responsible
for the development and marketing of CD-I. Philips, along with Sony Corp.,
were the pioneers in Compact Disc Digital Audio development and marketing.
What is CD-I?
Compact Disc Interactive (CD-I) is an evolutionary development from Compact
Disc Digital Audio. CD Digital Audio specifies how to place high quality
music on a digital optical disc, and then build a player retrieve that
music. CD-I uses the same physical discs as CD Digital Audio, but specifies
how to place pictures, speech, data, and interactive programs on the disc.
In addition, the CD-I specification proposed by Philips and Sony (the
so-called Green Book) gives details on how to build interactive machines to
play the material on a CD-I disc. These players are built around a 68000
family CPU and a real-time operating system, OS-9 (from Microware Systems
Corp., Des Moines, Iowa).
Philips expects to have prototype CD-I players available to developers
late in 1987. Sony and a number of other Japanese electronics companies
have major CD-I programs underway.
What will people do with CD-I?
CD-I is the first low cost mechanism for delivering interactive, multi-media
applications. Sony and Philips expect CD-I players to sell for $500-1000 by
1989. The discs themselves will vary in price depending on the content, but
the cost of a raw disc is much less than $10. A compact disc will hold up
to 600 Mbytes of digital data, and thus provides a very low cost solution
for many data storage problems.
The true value of CD-I, however, lies in the interactive, multi-media nature
of the applications which can be developed for it. These applications will
find use in corporate and institutional training, entertainment, classroom
education, catalogs and other database applications.
What is an 'Authoring System'?
Unlike CD audio, where existing tapes for phonographs could be used to
master CD audio discs, CD-I applications must be generated from scratch. A
digital, interactive, multi-media system has never existed before, so
potential CD-I applications developers (or 'authors') face a high hurdle
before they can translate their ideas into real discs.
A CD-I developer has three major tasks: design the application (describing
the pieces and how they fit together); assemble the data (get the pictures
and sound and edit them to conform to the design); test the interactive
application in real time to determine that the application behaves the way
it was intended. This is much like the software development cycle that Sun
is very familiar with. The exception is the multi-media nature of these
applications.
We expect Authoring Systems will consist of specialized hardware and
software modules built on a standard Sun platform. A single CD-I Authoring
installation will most likely consist of 3-8 Sun workstations (2-3 3/260
class servers and 1-5 3/110 class workstations), plus the specialized
hardware and software developed by this Project. The average list price for
the standard Sun equipment is estimated to be about $250K per site.
Who will buy Authoring Systems?
Philips has established a number of CD-I 'Studios' around the world. These
studios will act as service centers to CD-I authors during the initial phases
of the development of CD-I. They will purchase specialized audio and video
equipment to build libraries of data for authors, and they will be the first
customers for an Authoring System.
Later in the development of CD-I, companies or institutions would establish
CD-I authoring departments on their own, away from the Philips sponsored
studios, and these departments would be customers for the Authoring System.
Based on their current knowledge of the market, Philips expects the initial
demand (at introduction) of Authoring Systems by other customers to be
20-50 systems. The longer term potential of this market is unknown
at this time. If CD-I emerges as a major consumer appliance, then the
market for Authoring Systems is very large.
Why are we making this announcement?
Sun and Philips are announcing their cooperation at the Microsoft CDrom
conference on March 3. At this conference will be more than 1500 industry
leaders from publishing, corporate communications, data services, education
and software development. There is major press coverage surrounding this
conference, and the Sun-Philips announcement will be one of the major events
of the conference.
The reason we are announcing our cooperation publically, even though we have
no product to announce, is that we want to attract third party software
developers. We intend our Authoring System to be an open framework, to
which third parties can add their tools, utilities and applications. We
want to begin discussions with those outside developers very early in our
development, to make sure we are building the proper framework.
How should Sun respond to questions about this agreement?
It depends on the nature of the question.
If the caller has only a general interest in CD-I, they should be referred to
Philips (in North America, Bert Gall, CD-I Product Manager at Philips in
Knoxville TN (615) 558-5110).
Press people should be referred to Carol Broadbent, Sun Press Relations,
Mountain View, (415) 691-7737.
If the caller is a software developer with current projects related to CD-I
authoring, they should be referred to the Sun New Media Group (Steve MacKay
at Sun Mountain View (415) 691-7537).
If the caller wants to buy an Authoring System, we need to make it clear
that Sun has no Authoring System products at this time. This is a research
project only at this stage, with Sun and Philips studying the feasibility of
developing authoring products. We will know a schedule when we know what we
are building.
What do Philips and Sun bring to this Project?
Philips brings knowledge of CD-I specifications, specialized hardware and
software for encoding and decoding audio and video information, a
preliminary authoring system specification, pilot authoring studios, and the
worldwide reputation of Philips in the consumer and electronics markets.
Sun brings a solid, powerful hardware and software platform upon which to
build an authoring station, detailed computer systems knowledge, including
system software, applications and user interface experience, a sales and
marketing force with experience in selling high performance computer
workstations, and a solid reputation with the software development
community.
Philips has been looking for a computer partner for CD-I authoring for more
than a year, and selected Sun because of our open systems philosophy, our
relations with the software development world, and the New Media group's
longstanding interest in multi-media development.
Where will this leave Sun?
Optical Publishing, of which CD-I is the first wave, is projected to be very
big business. CD-I alone has been projected at a $1-$5B rate by 1991.
Projections this far out have to be viewed with skepticism, but Sun doesn't
wait that long to make money. The first people to make money in Optical
Publishing (other than the Pundits) are the people providing Authoring
Tools.
This agreement with Philips gives Sun an immense lead in this area. The
only competition we see are small software houses (which will probably move
their products onto Suns after this announcement), and early in-house
prototypes in several Japanese companies, which are based on technology more
from the video world than the computer environment.
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 21 May 87 11:02:40 PDT
From: grand!day@rand-unix.arpa (Dave Yost)
Subject: getting sun to release a better uucp
As most of you must know, Sun ships a clunky, old, pre-4.2 version of uucp.
Now 4.3 uucp is out, and it has a lot of good stuff in it, but Sun doesn't
seem to care. It seems the only way we'll get them to upgrade uucp is
by lots of us speaking up. Please send a message to sun!sunbugs or sun!hotline.
--dave yost
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 22 May 87 22:05:13 MDT
From: hi!kurt@hc.dspo.gov (Kurt Zeilenga)
Subject: 4.3 UUCP availability
Whoops... 4.3 UUCP is NOT available as I had previously mentioned.
So flame me...
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 21 May 87 16:33:49 PDT
From: van@lbl-csam.arpa (Van Jacobson)
Subject: new version of tcpdump available
There's a new version of tcpdump (a Sun-3 ethernet monitor program) available
for anonymous ftp from host lbl-rtsg.arpa (file tcpdump.tar or tcpdump.tar.Z).
This is version 1.11 and contains no major changes but lots of minor bug
fixes. The file REVHIST in the tarchive describes what changed.
[What follows is a probably-ill-considered flame at Sun. You're already past
the portion of this message with any information content; feel free to skip
the rest.]
For people interested in the source to tcpdump: In January, I asked SMI for a
letter saying I could distribute the source (since the program was loosely
based on Sun's etherfind). They said that should be no problem and would try
to send the letter as soon as they had had a chance to look over the program.
I gave them a copy of the source (and I understand parts of tcpdump
will be incorporated in a future SMI release) but no letter has shown up.
If anyone out there has a channel to Sun and is interested in having the
tcpdump source available, I would appreciate your banging on Sun. You can
point out that source availability can only help sell Sun systems: the program
requires Sun's NIT and, therefore, won't run on anyone else's Unix box. You
might also point out that the "products" that created SMI came about
through the free exchange of ideas *and source* throughout the
academic and research community.
This may seem like a lot of stew over one oyster but we've had a lot of
trouble with SMI lately over various source matters. I assume this is
happening because they're getting big and management responsibility is
shifting from technical people to lawyers. I think these policy changes
amount to cutting their own throats. After all, our whole community is tied
together with various networks so it's easy to send things to one another;
Unix has given us a "common language" so programs we write are at
least potentially useful to a large portion of the community; and
a decade of things like the BSD distribution, TeX, X Windows,
GNUmacs and net.sources have shown us how much faster we can
progress if we pass source around. Who wants to do business with
a vendor too stupid, too venal or just too out-of-touch to
understand this?
- Van Jacobson
disclaimer: The preceding was solely opinion and the opinion
was solely mine.
------------------------------
Date: Sun, 24 May 87 15:25:03 EDT
From: cmcl2!seismo!decvax!savax!dove@hp-pcd.UUCP (Webster Dove)
Subject: WARNING: electrical shorting problem in Sun 3 SCSI controller (FIX)
While investigating the misbehavior of a SCSI controller on my Sun
3/110, I discovered that the db50s D connector socket which attaches
the internal ribbon cable to the backplate of the 3/2 VME adapter
exposes the outer end of the ribbon cable to the metal fingers that
are part of the shielding on the backplate of the VME adapter. In my
case, the ribbon was shorted to ground leading to "SCSI bus always
busy" messages. I cured this by trimming the exposed end of the cable
back about 1mm. An alternative would be to put some protection over
it. Sun should use a socket that doesn't expose the ribbon.
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 26 May 87 13:04:33 PDT
From: ultra!wayne@ames (Wayne Hathaway)
Subject: Results of my "Emacs survey"
About a week ago I sent out the following general question:
Would anybody care to comment on UniPress Emacs
versus CCA Emacs versus GNU Emacs? I'm pretty much
sold on Emacs as a program editor, but which one?
I received ten responses (so far), and eight of them strongly
recommended GNU Emacs. The remaining two recommended UniPress,
although much less heartily. Nobody recommended CCA (and in fact
it was treated negatively in several responses).
Thnx to all who responded.
Wayne Hathaway ultra!wayne@ames.arpa
Ultra Corporation
2140 Bering Drive
San Jose, CA 95131
408-922-0100
PS: As to what we did, this mail is being composed with GNU Emacs ...
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 21 May 87 12:26 CST
From: KUSALIK%SASK.BITNET@wiscvm.wisc.edu (Tony Kusalik)
Subject: 'textedit' tool?
Is there any way to get 'textedit' to insert a ^D in a file?
^D is recognized as an accelerator for delete-next-character.
But sometimes its inclusion in a file is necessary (as in preparing
input scripts for an interactive program).
For that matter, is there any way to insert (via textedit)
other "special" control characters (such as ^P, ^W, etc)?
Note: I am running V3.0 on a SUN-3/50.
Tony Kusalik
kusalik@sask.bitnet
...!ihnp4!sask!kusalik
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 20 May 87 16:44:10 EDT
From: mrst!esr%genrad.UUCP@talcott.harvard.edu (Eric S. Rose)
Subject: RCS for the Sun?
Does anyone know where we can get versions of the
following items for a Sun (4.2):
1) RCS that runs on the Suns?
2) Two programs that are part of AT&T Documenters Workbench:
pic, and ditroff.
(We might get the whole package, if necessary)
3) Some kind of makemake utility (something that
makes makefiles.
If anyone knows any where we could get either of these,
or any other pointers, we would appreciate it!
"The moon is made of molecules" | Eric Rose
- NYNEX Commercial | MRS Technology
| mrst!esr@necis.nec.com
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 22 May 87 10:20:48 PDT
From: HUDGENS%FSU.MFENET@nmfecc.arpa (Jim Hudgens)
Subject: Sun IPC problems?
We are using a Sun3/280 with an IPC board installed. When running
pctool remotely, sometimes large blocks of the screen are not displayed
and remain blank. We have replaced the board, and reinstalled the
software from tape. The problem remains. Interestingly, causing the screen
to scroll often makes the image reappear. A screendump (printscreen)
also includes all the characters. This problem in very intermittent.
It happens most often when the pctool is emulating CGA monitor, and when it
is writing text to a clear screen. The following is an example screen:
C>dir
Volume in drive C is DRIVE_C
:\
22677 5-15-85 12:00a
MSDOS <DIR> 11:16a
R> 7-10-86 12:48a
SYSEX <DIR> 2:16p
R> 5-05-87 3:45p
CONFIG OLD 110 1:22p
R> 5-05-87 5:14p
AUTOEXEC BAK 176 1:21p
179 5-21-87 1:53p
CONFIG SYS 110 1:27p
) 9027584 bytes free
As you can see, blocks of text are blank (This was typed in by hand,
but was copied from a pctool window). When the screen scrolls up,
then all the missing text reappears.
Has anyone out there seen any problems like this? Any workarounds
would be nice, as would any replies at all.
Jim Hudgens
hudgens%fsu-mfenet@nmfecc.arpa
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 27 May 87 00:32:53 cdt
From: arnold%umn-cs-fsa@umn-cs.arpa (Doug Arnold)
Subject: Request for sendmail.cf which works with subdomain style hostnames?
Can anyone provide a sendmail.cf file which works on a Sun host
running 3.2 with a four part (subdomain style) hostname (like
s1.ima.umn.edu)? I want to be able to send and receive mail from
machines on the local ethernet directly and on the internet via a (non
Sun) mailhost which is on the local ethernet. My request to Sun
elicited the following response: the supplied versions of
sendmail.cf don't work for this type of hostname and require quite
extensive modifications; such modifications have been successfully
carried out, but they don't know by whom; why don't I send an appeal over
Usenet.
Thanks. -- Douglas N. Arnold
arnold%umn-cs-fsa@umn-cs.arpa
arnold%umn-cs-fsa@umn-cs.bitnet
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 20 May 87 02:53:39 PDT
From: c60a-3ed%lemon.Berkeley.EDU@berkeley.edu (Sugih Jamin)
Subject: kermit?
Hello,
Do you know how I can get a version of kermit for the SUN 3/50.
Thank's in advance
Sugih Jamin
(c60a-3ed@lemon.Berkeley.EDU)
------------------------------
Date: 20 May 87 08:00:19 GMT
From: mcvax!daimi!glad@seismo.css.gov (Michael Glad)
Subject: Public Domain INGRES on SUNs?
I have just retrieved the INGRES-system from the 4.3BSD distribution
tapes. Reading the READ_ME-files i see that INGRES won't perform very
well on SUNs.
Is someone able to tell me about their experience and perhaps about
changes that will improve INGRESs performance on SUNs.
Yours sincerely
Michael Glad
glad@daimi.UUCP
------------------------------
Date: Thu 21 May 87 00:14:07-PDT
From: ROODE%BIONET@sumex-aim.stanford.edu (David Roode)
Subject: taking system down for dumps other than level 0?
How much risk is there in leaving a system up when
doing incremental dumps? Is anything other than
an active file at risk?
------------------------------
Date: 20 May 87 22:30:13 GMT
From: mkhaw@teknowledge-vaxc.arpa (Michael Khaw)
Subject: query on dump to sun scsi tape?
What flags and parameters (other than 'c') are recommended for doing dumps
to sun3 scsi cartridge tapes? Should I try to specify tape length, density,
blocking, and if so, what values should I use? Is /dev/rst0 or /dev/rst8
preferable?
Thanks,
Mike Khaw
--
internet: mkhaw@teknowledge-vaxc.arpa
usenet: {hplabs|sun|ucbvax|decwrl|sri-unix}!mkhaw%teknowledge-vaxc.arpa
USnail: Teknowledge Inc, 1850 Embarcadero Rd, POB 10119, Palo Alto, CA 94303
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 21 May 87 15:28:46 EDT
From: km@emory.arpa (Ken Mandelberg)
Subject: Sun OS on Vaxen?
In looking through the Sun source distribution, I see a lot
of vax specific files (drivers, low level machine dependent stuff,..).
Is it possible to run Sun OS on a Vax?
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 25 May 87 16:10:44 EDT
From: drg%csri.toronto.edu@relay.cs.net (Dave Galloway)
Subject: SUN 3/140S and SMD disks
Has anyone tried putting an SMD controller into a SUN 3/140S, and using it
as a disk server ? Did it work ? Will it support as many clients as
a 3/160S ?
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 26 May 87 11:20:34
From: H_Eidnes%vax.runit.unit.uninett@tor.nta.no (Havard Eidnes)
Subject: Metafont on Sun-3, anyone?
Have any of you got Metafont up and running on the Sun-3?
We're having trouble getting it to run on our 3/160, Sun-OS 3.0.
Thanks in advance.
-------
E-Mail: <h_eidnes%vax.runit.unit.uninett@nta-vax.arpa> (or @tor.nta.no)
Havard Eidnes (or TeXish: H\aa vard Eidnes)
Division of Computer Science, Norwegian Institute of Technology
------------------------------
Date: Tue 26 May 87 13:54:16
From: MANSFIEL%EMBL.BITNET@wiscvm.wisc.edu (Niall Mansfiel)
Subject: funny filename completion (ls ~username fails)?
Sun OS 3.3, on 3/260:
Summary:
In csh, sometimes the commands
ls ~mansfiel
and
echo ~mansfiel
give no output, even tho user mansfiel has home dir
/usr2/mansfield, and it contains many files. At
other times, both commands do what you (or at least
I) would expect.
Sequence showing the problem:
I haven't found a sequence of operations which is
guaranteed to cause the problem, but with the
following, it often occurs:-
(initially, filec is not set)
ls ~ma<ESC><DEL>nsfiel<RET> - I forgot filec not set
... gives correct o/p
set filec
ls ~ma<ESC><RET> - ~ma completes to ~mansfiel
gives no output
ls ~mansfiel<RET> - i.e. typed in full
gives no output
^ls^echo<RET>
gives no output (other than history expansion)
???:
Once before, with a user 'schechin', whose homedir
was /usr2/schechinger, I got the same sort of thing.
The only thing I can think of at all is that the
home directory names are in both cases longer than
the username.
Has anybody any idea what is happening?
Thanks,
Niall
------------------------------
Date: 26 May 87 08:04:44 PDT
From: mayer.WBST128@xerox.com
Subject: SCSI inquiry?
For various and sundry reasons, my group is interested in attaching a
non sun generic SCSI drive to one of our Sun 3/110 workstations. Does
anyone have any bits of wisdom on the difficulty (if any) of adding
drives that the Sun software is not preconfigured to use? I remember
seeing some postings go by recently, but didn't think to save them.
Thank you.
(Grapevine) mayer.wbst (Arpa) mayer.wbst@Xerox.com
(NS) mayer:wbst128:xerox (Phone) (716) 422-2496
(UUCP) rochester!rocksanne!mayer
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 19 May 87 13:43:38 EDT
From: louden@gateway.mitre.org
Subject: Undocumented le0: Messages?
We are trying to clean up some things on our networks here.
The following three error messages keep showing up at the console
as coming from the ETHERNET interface on our SUN 3/50s:
le0: Received packet with STP bit in rmd cleared
le0: Received packet with ENP bit in rmd cleared
le0: Receive buffer error - BUFF bit set in rmd
Our machines are running the straight 3.2 release.
We have not found any of these messages documented in any of the SUN manuals.
QUESTIONS:
1) Can anyone tell me in what manual to find these?
2) Can anyone tell me what they mean?
3) Does anyone else get them?
4) Are these something we should be concerned about?
If so, why?
If not, why does SUN generate them?
------------------------------
End of SUN-Spots Digest
***********************