kevind@cs.albany.edu (Kevin M. Dombroski) (05/21/91)
Folks,
I've been fiddling with the same problem on and off for the past
few weeks. The problem deals with communicating between the Front-End and
Back-End machines (Sun 3/50's), and may be a problem with odt. I am using the
"regular" version of odt vs. the distributed version. Have any of you seen the
following behavior:
When typing commands, all characters of the command are echoed correctly to my
screen. After pressing <return>, things seem to hang, and after pressing
<return> a few more times, I get a "command: not found" error message. However,
"command: not found" would appear as "c m nd: not found", with missing letters.
typing the same command several times results in different letters missing
(eg. "c m nd: not found" or com nd: not found or " mm d: not found"). I've
re-compiled with the PRINTERRORS flag turned on, and I see that I am getting
"Parity Error, Data Overrun, Framing Error" errors. Zoinks! In an effort to
find out what's going on (bad ports, odt, etc.), I performed the following
tests:
I connected my serial cable between my Front-End machine and a terminal,
and then did the following:
1). On Front-End Machine: cat big-text-file > /dev/ttya
-- all text appeared exactly as it should on the terminal
2). On Front-End Machine: cat < /dev/ttya
On terminal: held down the 'f' key and generated 400 characters,
then pressed return
-- saw roughly 140 consecutive 'f' characters on Front-End
Machine
3). `odt' on Front-End Machine
-- All characters typed on the console appear correctly on
the terminal. HOWEVER, when typing on the terminal, many
of the characters were dropped when displayed on the
console, exactly as I described when receiving error
messages back from Xinu.
Eg. SUN to terminal: Typing "this is a test" appears as
"this is a test"
terminal to SUN: Typing "this is a test" appears as
"th s a st"
4). `odt' on Front-End Machine
Held down a single key on the terminal:
"a"'s DO NOT appear
"b"'s DO NOT appear
"c"'s appear
"d"'s DO NOT appear
"e"'s appear
"f"'s appear
"g"'s DO NOT appear
"h"'s DO NOT appear
"i"'s appear
etc., etc.
I performed the same tests from other Sun 3/50's; I used 2 different cables -
same results. What do you think? Any ideas? Has this happened to you? Is odt
the culprit? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
kevind
P.S. Yes, I know Thomas Narten teaches at this school. He is away on vacation
for a few weeks, and I am stuck in this user room with bread and water
until this project works...