masscomp@soma.bcm.tmc.edu (Stan Barber, Moderator) (05/18/88)
This is the second of many installments summarizing what happened at the 1988 Annual MUS meeting held in Danvers, MA from Tuesday, April 19th until Thursday, April 21st. Initially, I will summarize those things I personnally took notes on. Any other persons who want to submit summaries, please do so. Also, opinions expressed are obviously mine. Other opinions are welcome. This summary will deal with networking. The networking release in RTU4.0 will support NFS, the network file system used by Sun Microsystems which has become an industry stadard. To support NFS, some changes were made to RTU. Here are a few of them. 1. The /etc/fstab file format is now like BSD 4.3. This allows the support of a variety of file system types. Potentinally, you could have a MASSCOMP with an RTU file system on one disk and a BSD file system on another some day. [This is NOT supported in RTU 4.0. The only file system types are rtu and nfs!] 2. All programs MUST use the BSD-style directory routines to read directory entries. The V7-style open/read/close method does not work with NFS mounted file systems. 3. All utilities that use directory entries now support BSD long names, not just the 14 character filenames. The RTU file system still enforces this limit, but if you mount an NFS file system that is on a BSD machine, you can use long names (greater than 14 characters) and it will work just like it does on BSD Unix. 4. RTU conditional links will only work between rtu file systems. Regular symbolic links work as expected on RTU and BSD file systems. 5. MASSCOMP does not recommend the use of NFS mounted partitions as places to use for data acquisition. Use REAL disk for data acq. There is a new release of SP-70 due out later this summer that will support 4.3BSD style subnet addressing. This will also allow a MASSCOMP to act as a REAL network gateway. The sendmail included with RTU 4.0 is unsupported. mmdf is the MASSCOMP supported mailer and is expected to be available in September. This is the end of summary 4. If you were there and you disagree with my statements here, please drop me a line. Stan Barber, Immediate Past President Masscomp Users' Society Moderator of comp.sys.masscomp -- The MASSCOMP USERS' SOCIETY newsgroup is comp.sys.masscomp. Articles to: masscomp@soma.bcm.tmc.edu or uunet!soma.bcm.tmc.edu!masscomp Administrative stuff: masscomp-request@soma.bcm.tmc.edu Stan Barber, Moderator