root@uwspan.UUCP (John Plocher) (12/31/87)
[ This is another posting which I am handling for Robert White - John ]
This message is aimed at all the Microport System V/AT v.2.x out there...
I've been using Microport SysV for about 6 months now, and overall
I've been extremely happy with the product so far: I find that generally
I have no problem porting well-written software to it (news 2.11.13,
patch, smail, uemacs, jove, spread, etc), and that the system runs
very solidly & reliably (I even feed news to a couple of local sites).
However, besides the fact that I still don't have any information
on how to upgrade to 2.3 (I'm still stuck at 2.2), I find that there are
a couple of really annoying problems that keep nagging me:
[ Call Microport Sales at (800) PC2-UNIX -which is- (800) 722-8649, ask
about the 2.3 upgrade. -John ]
1) the fact that mail returns a *failed* status on messages longer
than 32kB. This is especially annoying with smail, since smail
will dutifully send back every long message you receive to its
sender.
[ Install John Zeeff's lmail replacement which was posted in
comp.sources.misc a month ago (also from plocher@uwspan.uucp
- if I get more than 10 requests for it I will post it -)
This also allows mail to be sent to programs and files! -John ]
2) the fact that cron executes *some* commands twice. This is
most annoying with some commands that purge log files, etc.
[ This is fixed in 2.3 -John ]
Now, I was wondering: since the net is a great place to meet other uport
users with the same problems, why don't we put our resources together &
try to solve these problems ourselves? In some cases (like the clock
that can't keep the time under 2.2 or the tty driver that panics), there
isn't much we can do, but for things like mail or cron, these are separate
executable images: we simply have to find or write a Public Domain version,
and post it to the net!
[ lmail.c is a replacement for the mailer; the other problem wasn't with cron
but with the @#$%$# clock problem which managed to fire off cron twice or
more because the time changed while cron was running! -John ]
Or, at least, we could post the various solutions that some of us have
surely come up with to solve those problems that uport seems to have
fairly low on their priority list.
I guess the first question is: are there any commonly available P.D. versions
of mail and cron?
-----------------
PS. To get the ball rolling, I guess I can explain how *I* cope with the
above problems.
1) my solution to the smail/mail problem is to have a special version
of smail that doesn't return failed remote mail to the sender, but
rather to the postmaster. This is a tiny change in deliver.c in
the smail sources, if anyone is interested, I can EMail it to them.
2) my solution to the cron problem is uglier: each of my cron commands
toggles a "lock file" in /tmp so that they will only execute 1/2 the
time. This isn't perfect since System V/AT does not double-execute
*every* command.
Well, now let's hear from all of you uPort users out there...
--
Denis Fortin | fortin@zap.UUCP
CAE Electronics Ltd | philabs!micomvax!zap!fortin
The opinions expressed above are my own | fortin%zap.uucp@uunet.uu.net
--
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