cyrus@comtec.UUCP (Cyrus in person) (04/05/91)
Someone is posting this for me, so please send all replies
to comtec!tera!brandyn@ucsd.edu (if you post a reply, please send
it to me too, 'cause I have no news access at the moment).
Here is a summary of my questions (details follow):
My machine is a NeXT Station ('040) running 2.0.
1) Can I get comp.sys.next sent to me via mail, as I have no news?
2) How do I rebuild the librarian index for the Unix Man pages?
3) Does the Altech Systems (mac) midi converter work with the 040?
4) Where can I get midi cables?
5) How can I convert from nroff to rtf? (Librarian does it, no?)
6) What ARE the bugs in 2.0 pertaining to the serial ports?
What are the workarounds? (cron execing an stty < cua is one)
7) I can only receive one uucp file per call in telebit PEP mode. Why?
8) Is the 2.1 update available by ftp, or is there someone in the
San Diego area with 2.1 who would let me copy it?
9) Is there a *selective* archive program publicly available?
Details:
1) I have a uucp mail connection, but no news feed. Can I receive
and *post* news using mail? What about other newsgroups in general?
2) I added some man pages, and when I tried to update the Unix Man Pages
index in digital librarian, it started indexing my home dirrectory. Now
I have no index for it at all and can't use the d.l. for unix man.
3,4) I have a mac midi converter (Altech Systems) with one serial
connection, four midi out, and 1 midi in. I made my own midi cable,
and I don't get the slightest indication (using ensemble) that the
computer is talking with the synth (Korg DSS1). I only have one cable,
but I've tried it in both directions (next->synth, synth->next). No
midi errors, even. I've heard that if one isn't careful about the way
they hook up the sheild when making a midi cable (which I wasn't) that
it wont work. There are too many variables for me to figure out where
it's going wrong. Any advice would be appriciated.
5) I have lots of nroff files I would like to start using a screen
oriented editor on (WriteNow). Converting them to rtf would allow
me to import them to NeXT Step via the "copy" command (see unix
man page for "copy" and "paste"). Digital librarian appears to
convert the Unix Man Pages to rtf for display. Can I tap this facility?
6) I have a modem (telebit) on ttyda. Frequently, it gets in this
state where nothing transmits from the modem to the computer. I can
tip to it, and issue commands, but get nothing back. Leaving tip
and returning sometimes fixes the problem. When uucp calls in like
this, nothing transpires and it times out. The problem appears to
happen both with and without hardware flow control enabled on the
telebit. I haven't mucked with flow control on the tty, if there is
a way to do that. Observing that polling cua seemed to release ttyda
from it's frozen state, I set cron to "stty < /dev/cua > /dev/null"
on regular intervals when I know a uucp will soon follow. That actually
seems to work, which bothers me. I am NOT setting any parameters with
stty, just reading them. The problem is recurring: if uucp calls before
the stty, it does not work.
7) Using uucp spoofing and PEP mode on the Telebit T2500 causes a
strange problem. Uucp times out AFTER successfully sending the first
file. The next time it calls, it gets the next file accross, and so
on. So a mail message takes two calls (one for the body, and one for
the command). It works fine at 9600 baud with no spoofing. It really
coppies that first file FAST. It would be nice to make it work that
way all the time. I am using the Telebit configuration given in the
UUCP.wn document for system 1.0, save changes to the hardware flow
control registers (58 & 68?) and a fixed baud rate.
8) Is it safe to assume that as NeXT is distributing 2.1 "at cost"
that it is legal to copy the 2.1 update from anyone who has it? I
can bring a scsi tape drive to any sight in the San Diego area (I'm
in Oceanside) that would let me copy 2.1. I'm hoping it will help
with my serial port problems.
9) I finally got the tape drive working (by writing a program to set
the driver to a fixed block size), only to find that NeXT cpio doesn't
support symbolic links. Tar, to my knowledge, has no way of selectively
archiving (eg. skipping .o and core files). I am presently writing a
very simple archiver that will be portable across machines (that is,
the header information for a file will not be machine or OS specific,
so archives written on a mac could be read on a NeXT, for instance).
I've separated out about a page of code that is machine specific (things
like returning a list of files in a directory) so it will be trivial
to port. All information is preserved (mod times, owner, perms, etc..).
Before I waste my time finishing this, is there something like this out
there already?
Again, direct all replies to comtec!tera!brandyn@ucsd.edu please.
Brandyn