jk@Apple.COM (John Kullmann) (10/04/88)
in answer to all the questions about 1.0.1, it contains NO functional improvements. it is functionally equivalent (exactly) to 1.0 a/ux except that we have tweeked the sash and kernel to provide support for the mac IIx (68030). it is of no interest to anyone running on a mac II (however, 1.0.1 will run on both). -------------------- ------------------- John Kullmann "All opinions and comments are mine alone" A/UX Technical Mgr ..!apple!jk Voice: 408-973-2939
chn@a.lanl.gov (Charles Neil) (10/04/88)
In article <18183@apple.Apple.COM>, jk@Apple.COM (John Kullmann) writes: > in answer to all the questions about 1.0.1, it contains NO > functional improvements. > . . . > -------------------- ------------------- > John Kullmann "All opinions and comments are mine alone" > A/UX Technical Mgr ..!apple!jk > Voice: 408-973-2939 Now about A/UX 1.1: has the end of year situation cleared up enough to release it? I'm anxiously waiting for color, large/multiple monitors, toolbox, etc. -- Charlie Neil (chn@lanl.gov) Los Alamos National Laboratory (505) 665-0978
dyer@spdcc.COM (Steve Dyer) (10/04/88)
In article <18183@apple.Apple.COM> jk@Apple.COM (John Kullmann) writes: >in answer to all the questions about 1.0.1, it contains NO >functional improvements. Why is it that when some ridiculous question like "When is 1.X.Y" coming out gets asked, or when there's a Unisoft/Apple flame war, there is always someone from Apple lurking on the net who can answer, but when there is a legitimate problem concerning the ethernet interface under A/UX which apparently is shared by every customer with a serious ethernet, all we get is dead air? Whatsa matter, you folks don't use ethernet? You don't use A/UX? Your boss has commanded that you don't say anything because the design of the ethernet card is bad and you can't afford to replace them all? What's going on? I'd really like to hear something. -- Steve Dyer dyer@harvard.harvard.edu dyer@spdcc.COM aka {harvard,husc6,linus,ima,bbn,m2c,mipseast}!spdcc!dyer
jherr@umbio.MIAMI.EDU (Jack Herrington) (10/05/88)
in article <754@a.lanl.gov>, chn@a.lanl.gov (Charles Neil) says: > Now about A/UX 1.1: has the end of year situation cleared up enough > to release it? I'm anxiously waiting for color, large/multiple > monitors, toolbox, etc. Seriously, my apple rep. said that they just didn't have the time before the first release to put in sound, and color (SCSI I could conceivably see as a security hole). But this has been enough time... -Jack
phil@Apple.COM (Phil Ronzone) (10/06/88)
In article <1981@spdcc.COM> dyer@spdcc.COM (Steve Dyer) writes: [Why is it that there is not someone from Apple lurking on the net who can answer about legitimate problems?] >Whatsa matter, you folks don't use ethernet? You don't use A/UX? >Your boss has commanded that you don't say anything because the >design of the ethernet card is bad and you can't afford to replace >them all? What's going on? I'd really like to hear something. Steve has a rational question. We at Apple tend to answer questions that we know the answer to or have definite/strong opinions on. Networking problems are complex -- we aren't at the customers site and generally don't know what unusual and/or unique local "customizations" may exist at the site for example. If it makes you feel better, I was reading comp.unix.aux specifically to gather up all the "I have a network/Ethernet problem" postings and put them in a document for the manager of the A/UX Ethernet group to read. I was doing this because my reaction was like Steve's -- gee, there are a lot of complaints about this suddenly, maybe we'd better look see. What is going on? Well, there is no bad Ethernet card situation or anything like that. And I don't know enough about protocols to say if the postings show "we is doing it wrong" or what. BUT WE ARE AWARE OF IT AND AIN'T IGNORING IT. Looking at my saved postings file, the last time we have a "bunch" of I have an Ethernet problem was quite a time ago. It seemed that 4-5 people plugged their Ethernet card into A/UX and expected it to right without running autoconfig and setting the daemons on /etc/inittab. So there was a bunch of "A/UX Ethernet doesn't work" postings. The instructions in the release manual explicitly showed how to run autoconfig and enable the daemons -- but hey, we're Macintosh users, we don't read no stinkin' manuals... Is that "anti-dead air" enough? :-) +------------------------+-----------------------+----------------------------+ | Philip K. Ronzone | A/UX System Architect | APPLELINK: RONZONE1 | | Apple Computer MS 27AJ +-----------------------+----------------------------+ | 10500 N. DeAnza Blvd. | If you post a bug to the net, and the manufacturer | | Cupertino CA 95014 | doesn't read it,does that mean it doesn't exist? | +------------------------+----------------------------------------------------+ |{amdahl,decwrl,sun,voder,nsc,mtxinu,dual,unisoft}!apple!phil | +-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
dyer@arktouros.MIT.EDU (Steve Dyer) (10/06/88)
In article <18289@apple.Apple.COM> phil@Apple.COM (Phil Ronzone) writes: >What is going on? Well, there is no bad Ethernet card situation or anything >like that. And I don't know enough about protocols to say if the postings >show "we is doing it wrong" or what. BUT WE ARE AWARE OF IT AND AIN'T >IGNORING IT. I would guess that you don't know enough about the situation to say that there is no bad Ethernet card situation. The symptoms seem to relate to more than one packet arriving at the interface within a short period of time--it's not a protocol problem, though it may be a device driver problem or limitation. I wouldn't dismiss hardware, however. I've seen this happen under A/UX with (presumptive) broadcasts but also with a simple "rcp -r remote:dir dir"--the network dies every time. I'd try to change the MTU of the ae0 interface to something smaller than 1500 to see if that had any effect when using TCP, but I haven't found the appropriate ifnet structure in the kernel yet. I am always puzzled by responses like that above (and it's not unique to Apple), because it essentially says "the problem report is written down", which is gratifying, but strangely unsatisfactory to anyone who also works in software (especially someone who works with 4.3 networking regularly.) If I were at Apple, I'd grab the person who wrote the ae interface driver by the collar and say: "what gives?" Usually an first-degree explanation of the problem is obvious, although a solution may not be. Of course, it may be that the person who wrote this isn't at Apple, which makes things tougher. >Looking at my saved postings file, the last time we have a "bunch" of >I have an Ethernet problem was quite a time ago. It seemed that 4-5 people >plugged their Ethernet card into A/UX and expected it to right without >running autoconfig and setting the daemons on /etc/inittab. So there >was a bunch of "A/UX Ethernet doesn't work" postings. The instructions in >the release manual explicitly showed how to run autoconfig and enable the >daemons -- but hey, we're Macintosh users, we don't read no stinkin' manuals... That is not the case here in any of the recent postings. I would like to know, of those of you who are running A/UX on a heterogeneous ethernet, if there are any of you who are operating WITHOUT this problem. That would be a useful datapoint. --- Steve Dyer dyer@arktouros.MIT.EDU dyer@spdcc.COM aka {harvard,husc6,ima,bbn,m2c,mipseast}!spdcc!dyer
dave@onfcanim.UUCP (Dave Martindale) (10/06/88)
In article <18289@apple.Apple.COM> phil@Apple.COM (Phil Ronzone) writes: >| If you post a bug to the net, and the manufacturer | >| doesn't read it,does that mean it doesn't exist? | Unlike trees in a forest, when one user makes a noise the rest listen. While we're talking about Ethernet: I posted a query a while ago asking why NFS on A/UX always reads and writes 1024 bytes at a time, ignoring the rsize and wsize options to "mount", plus any hints that the NFS server may provide. I got a couple of responses (but none from Apple) suggesting that the Ethernet card just isn't capable of receiving multiple back-to-back packets, and so the software forces the read size to be small enough that only one packet will get sent back. Question one: is this true? Is Apple going to offer an "industrial-strength" Ethernet card that has better performance? Question two: even if the card can't handle multiple incoming packets, why can't I *send* more than 1K in a write? A/UX has the most reliable NFS implementation of the various machines around here, and I'm happy about that, but also the worst performance. I'd like reliability *and* speed.
mellon@eris.berkeley.edu (Ted Lemon) (10/06/88)
In article <18289@apple.Apple.COM> phil@Apple.COM (Phil Ronzone) writes: >I have an Ethernet problem was quite a time ago. It seemed that 4-5 people >plugged their Ethernet card into A/UX and expected it to right without >running autoconfig and setting the daemons on /etc/inittab. So there >was a bunch of "A/UX Ethernet doesn't work" postings. The instructions in >the release manual explicitly showed how to run autoconfig and enable the >daemons -- but hey, we're Macintosh users, we don't read no stinkin' manuals... Having been one of the people in that group, I must say that your accusations are groundless. I wasn't provided with TFM to R. In fact, we still haven't received the A/UX release notes, six months after A/UX arrived. We also haven't received any documentation about how to make a second drive work, or any of that wonderful stuff. The support staff has been very good about tracking down and sending every bizarre manual they can lay their hands on, but never the correct one. If anyone's interested, I've been sent some really old (antique?) APDA documents for A/UX, of which I had previously had only the smaller, inferior post-release versions. :'} Also, there was a defective Ethertalk card, produced for Apple by 3Com. Apple stopped delivery of Ethertalk cards for quite a while while that little mixup was resolved. Supposedly, there was a bug in the PROM which resulted in poor performance under some circumstances. Given the current performance, I'd sure hate to have one of the old ones. Bye the way, does, or will, A/UX support the SCSI adapter card which plugs into NuBus and actually, incredibly, does DMA? I understand that this is a third party product, but I'm sure that it would do wonders for disk performance! _MelloN_
tjt@tis.llnl.gov (Tim Tessin) (10/07/88)
In article <7325@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> dyer@arktouros.MIT.EDU (Steve Dyer) writes: > > I would guess that you don't know enough about the situation to say that > there is no bad Ethernet card situation. The symptoms seem to relate > to more than one packet arriving at the interface within a short period of > time--it's not a protocol problem, though it may be a device driver problem > or limitation. I wouldn't dismiss hardware, however. I've seen this happen > under A/UX with (presumptive) broadcasts but also with a simple > "rcp -r remote:dir dir"--the network dies every time. > > That is not the case here in any of the recent postings. I would like to > know, of those of you who are running A/UX on a heterogeneous ethernet, > if there are any of you who are operating WITHOUT this problem. That > would be a useful datapoint. I bought a Kinetics EtherPort II card for my Mac II. The kinetics card is not a 3com, it's an Excelan somthing-or-other. I called up Kinetics and they sent me a A/UX driver. It hung just like the Apple cards. A few calls to tech support and they had the guy who wrote the driver out here to fix it first hand (Of course, they are only 30 miles away). The problem seems to stem from other machines on the network not obeying the minimum packet inter-arrival specs for Ethernet. I suppose you could say that machines who don't obey the spec don't belong on the net, but that ain't realistic. We have a very large network with about 1500 machines from pc's to cray-2's. The big machines provide a backbone using hyperchannel with DEC LANBridge 100 to bridge to the ethernet sub-nets. Since we run heterogeneous protocols (DECNET, TCP/IP, etc) over the wires, we can't filter the packets, so everyone sees everything on the net. My A/UX system hasn't quit since the driver fix, running uninteruppted for at least 4-6 weeks at a stretch (that being the longest I have run it without voluntarily rebooting). Tim Tessin - Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory PHONE: (415) 423-4560 ARPA: tjt@tis.llnl.gov UUCP: {ames,ihnp4,lll-crg,lll-lcc,mordor}!lll-tis!tjt
kaufman@polya.Stanford.EDU (Marc T. Kaufman) (10/07/88)
In article <15054@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> mellon@eris.berkeley.edu (Ted Lemon) writes: >We also >haven't received any documentation about how to make a second drive work, >or any of that wonderful stuff. Well, this part is (relatively) easy. Just format the drive, then use dp to create the partitions. Then put 'pname' entries into ptab and the mount info into mtab. It took two days of reading the FM and trying to make it go,... but it was trivial when I finally figured out what was going on. Too bad Apple hasn't written up a quick checksheet for this. BTW: HD setup, which creates partition maps on Apple drives, has a different idea of what flag bits to set than A/UX does. No one seems to know why, at this time. Also, none of Apple's HD Setup partitions use bad-block areas. I don't know if this is because (1) the disk controller has hardware bad-blocking, or (2) the software bad-blocking does not work, or (3) the Mac OS people don't know what this field means, or (4) Apple disks never get bad blocks. Marc Kaufman (kaufman@polya.stanford.edu)
mellon@eris.berkeley.edu (Ted Lemon) (10/07/88)
In article <4330@polya.Stanford.EDU> kaufman@polya.Stanford.EDU (Marc T. Kaufman) writes: >Well, this part is (relatively) easy. Just format the drive, then use dp to >create the partitions. Then put 'pname' entries into ptab and the mount info >into mtab. It took two days of reading the FM and trying to make >it go,... but it was trivial when I finally figured out what was going on. Well, this is all very well and good, but when I tried that, I had some serious trouble booting to Finder. I forget the details. After messing with it for a few hours, we just dd'd the A/UX disk to the new drive and remade the filesystems on the new drive. Needless to say, this is not a user friendly installation procedure... _MelloN_
wetter@tybalt.caltech.edu (Pierce T. Wetter) (10/08/88)
> Stuff about how "It's all in the Manual deleted."
Ah. But how do I get my Priam 330 meg disk to work under both MacOS and
A/UX? The manual specifically states that this is hairy, and that they don't
want to tell you how to mix operating systems, but I want to anyway.
First problem: Since the Priam doesn't know about partitions, if I use dp
to add the six or so I need for A/UX will that wipe out the driver?
Pierce
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wetter@tybalt.caltech.edu pwetter@caltech.bitnet pwetter@caltech.edu
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Weird theory #47: Islamic women can do kinky things with their ankles,
that's why the Koran says they aren't supposed to
reveal them in public. kaufman@polya.Stanford.EDU (Marc T. Kaufman) (10/09/88)
In article <8254@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu> wetter@tybalt.caltech.edu.UUCP (Pierce T. Wetter) writes: >Ah. But how do I get my Priam 330 meg disk to work under both MacOS and >A/UX? The manual specifically states that this is hairy, and that they don't >want to tell you how to mix operating systems, but I want to anyway. >First problem: Since the Priam doesn't know about partitions, if I use dp >to add the six or so I need for A/UX will that wipe out the driver? Well, that is indeed the problem. The only way you can mix the systems is if the driver supplied for the Mac OS will honor the new type partition map, and reinitialize the OS partition based on the logical size in the PM entry. We finally got a version of the SuperMac driver that will do this,... but it took some time. BTW, there ought to be a way to zero the first three blocks of a partition from 'dp'. If you resize a Mac OS partition without moving it, the driver has no way of knowing that the last 500 blocks now belong to A/UX! Push on your friendly (sic!) vendor to get a better driver. Did you know that the installation program must not only put the driver update in the place the Partition Map says, but must also update the driver pointer field in block 0? (Helpful hint #315) Marc Kaufman (kaufman@polya.stanford.edu)
tph@walt.cc.utexas.edu (tan pow hwee) (12/02/89)
I am thinking of acquiring a used A/UX 1.0.1 software. What are the improvements Ver 1.1.1 offer over 1.0.1? Basically, I just want to be able to run plain unix on my Mac II with PMMU. Thanks in advance for any answers. --------------------------------------------------------------------- PH Tan tph@cs.utexas.edu ---------------------------------------------------------------------