[comp.unix.i386] vpix problems

witold@cs.washington.edu (Witold Paluszynski) (12/06/89)

Hi,

I am new to 386/ix and System V in general (I have used various
flavors of BSD systems for a number of years).  I just tried using
VP/ix and discovered some serious problems with it.  The system
has a DOS partition (32 MB) on the disk which is mounted with:
	mount -f DOS /dev/dsk/0p1 /dos
When I try accessing the files on this partition (created under
DOS), most of them look like they are empty.  TYPE'ing or
COPY'ing produce just blank lines.  From Unix, ls shows that they
are not empty, have 777 protection, and are owned by root.  But
cat or more only produce blank lines.  These files are normally
accessible from DOS with TYPE or COPY.

Upon some investigation, things look even worse.  While most
files cannot be more'd some can, but garbage follows (what should
be) the end of the file.  For some otherwise normal DOS files ls
reports enormous lengths.  Other non-empty files have length 0.
Still other files have lengths about what they should be.

Is this behavior normal under VP/ix or should I suspect a problem
with this system?  What kind of problem?  This system has been
newly installed from the just received 386/ix version 2.0.2.

Thanks,
Witold

caf@omen.UUCP (Chuck Forsberg) (12/07/89)

In article <10071@june.cs.washington.edu> witold@june.cs.washington.edu (Witold Paluszynski) writes:
:I am new to 386/ix and System V in general (I have used various
:flavors of BSD systems for a number of years).  I just tried using
:VP/ix and discovered some serious problems with it.  The system
:has a DOS partition (32 MB) on the disk which is mounted with:
:	mount -f DOS /dev/dsk/0p1 /dos

Instead of mounting the partition as a phoney Unix file system which
VP/ix must then translate back to a DOS file system, why not access
the DOS partition directly from VP/ix with an entry in vpix.cnf:

; MS-DOS partition on first hard disk
D			/dev/hd00

In my experience, the result of mount -f DOS is sufficiently
dissimilar from a *nix file system that programs such as du
and find are confused.

Chuck Forsberg WA7KGX          ...!tektronix!reed!omen!caf 
Author of YMODEM, ZMODEM, Professional-YAM, ZCOMM, and DSZ
  Omen Technology Inc    "The High Reliability Software"
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michaelb@wshb.UUCP ( WSHB employee) (12/09/89)

> :has a DOS partition (32 MB) on the disk which is mounted with:
> :	mount -f DOS /dev/dsk/0p1 /dos
> VP/ix must then translate back to a DOS file system, why not access
> the DOS partition directly from VP/ix with an entry in vpix.cnf:
> 
> ; MS-DOS partition on first hard disk
> D			/dev/hd00

I have used this method at my site and it works quite well. Before you can
do it, though, you must set the file permissions on /dev/hd00 to make
it readable by your intended users ie. rwxr--r-- . I am running a 386
box with SCO XENIX but I'm fairly certain the same applies to all of the
VP/ix implementations. 

Also, since this will be a sharable resource, none of the users will
have write permission, similar to the VP/ix standard boot image disk.
We haven't found this to be much of a restriction.

--
Michael Batchelor - Systems / Operations Engineer
WSHB - An International Broadcast Station of
            The Christian Science Monitor Syndicate
uunet!wshb!michaelb      803-625-4880