richard@octel.UUCP (Richard Karasik) (12/05/90)
This is an appeal to people that run ISC Unix 2.2. If there is someone
from Interactive who reads this column - HALLLLLPPPP!
This is something between an appeal for help, a litany of woes in
installing ISC, and the beginnings of a letter to ISC.
----------------------LONG------------------------------
I bought the workstation developer's kit of software, and aside from basic
unix installation have been in installation hell for weeks.
I am running a plain vanilla 386 33 MHZ clone - 600 MB esdi disk, 19
inch hitachi superscan+, 8MB memory, Bell HUB card, tecmar tape, 1.2,
1.44 MB diskettes, logitech hires mouse, trailblazer etc.
I do not have a network, or an ethernet card, but I had to buy the
workstation developer to get other chunks of software I wanted -such as
X11 developer kit etc without paying the extra hundreds of $ required if you
buy piecemeal.
The first major problems I ran into were around setting up mail, and
setting up the HUB card.
I configured mail according to the instructions, and then ran
newaliases. At that point the system just hung forever. I followed all
the instructions for setting up mail in a non TCP environment.
I called the "free support" line at ISC and found a customer service that was
a cross between the marx brothers, and the seven dwarfs. The people there knew
even less than I did about their own system, and I had only played with the
product for a few days at that time.
At various times they were sure that sendmail couldn't run unless I had
a network installed, there was no way to use old password files from
a system I was replacing (OPUS), that the HUB card was no longer
supported - even though the drivers were part of the delivered
kernel, that bidirectional traffic on a hub port was patently
impossible -etc etc. (I have found out that the free service lines are not
staffed by "experts", but more or less by refugees from venice beach who have
learned to spel unix correctly 3 times out of five which is good enough
to use the ISC-Sooper-Dooper-CUstomer-first-strike-emergency-response-faste-
than-a-speeding-bullet-customized-do-what-I-mean-and-give-me-an-answer-now
database. They also get to talk to the real experts when they can't find the
enter key. (excuse me Im kind of jaded here ... When are companies going
to learn that its more effective in the current market place to put
your experts in the front lines - or at least make them available to the front
lines without too much hassle. Ah well a separate discussion that
will generate flames from all sides.)
At any rate it took a few loud squawks to various people at ISC and two
weeks of time ( I could only work at night on these, and usually had a 1
day turn around time via phone from ISC - ie they were usually not
available when I called, and I then had to play phone tag for almost a
day to get somebody.)
It turns out that my distributor installed TCP/IP but didn't configure
it. SO we had to configure it to run "local loopback". Then sendmail
which was only configured for uucp connections would actually work!
This still makes no sense to me. If there is that dependency, then it
should be spelled out in large letters. BUT if you are asked to
configure sendmail for uucp connections only (via rs232) then the damned
product shouldn't depend on whether or not TCP even exists. This one
does.
Ok so now we have used up 3 weeks of my free support from ISC.
So now I tackle VPIX and pc interface (PCI). But in my infinite wisdom I said
-hah I don't have TCP/IP so lets get rid of it entirely. In other words having
it there and configured but not connected to a card only used up machine
cycles- why not just remove it entirely?
Well it seems that if you removepckg from sysadm, and it happens to be TCP/IP, it
strips out an include file (I believe it's pty.h) that the kernel needs
when configuring the pseudo ttys for PCI.
This was news to ISC people who spent another three days telling me I'd
have to reinstall TCP/IP in order to get PCI to work over a serial port!!!!
Instead I just mounted the TCP diskette and pulled the include file off! At
that point the kernel linked and after more fiddling I got PCI to work fine.
You may remember that I eliminated TCP/IP -so now my mail didn't work at
all. After another 2 days on the phone, it turns out that not only do I
have to configure my mail environment to use uucp(rs232) links only, but
I now have to request that smail be used -even though I have none of the
perquisites for running smail (ie pathaliases etc). The ISC people said
OH if you arent running TCP/IP, then you have to run SMAIL because it
looks to see if tcp is running and if not it doesnt look for
pathaliases, but instead just sends mail to your name resolver.
Don't look in the fine manual for this one. The problem is that all this was
starting to make some perverse kind of sense -which worried me.
On the other hand the weirdness of VPIX needs some looking into.
regardless of how many DOSPATHS etc etc that I set, I still cant get
microsoft word to start up no matter what directory I'm in. In fact I
have to get into VPIX and start up word from its install directory.
PATH, DOSPATH, etc even in the autoexec.bat file just don't seem to do what the
book says they're supposed to.
Of course by now everyone knows that Windows 3.0 doesn't work with VPIX,
but ISC is working on it ... What's mind numbing is that I cant talk to
my disks as d: e: f: etc even though TFM says I should at least be able
to talk to disk D: as D: if I do enough weird things. Instead everything
is related to a subdirectory of Z: eg: disk e: might be Z:\dos3.
Fine -but when Im running pure dos all of the bat files that use Z:\dos3
instead of E: blow up. there seems to be no nice compromise between VPIX
and real DOS in this regard.
Oh and I suppose somebody has figured out the funny message that comes
up every now and again saying FD0 not present when moving files from DOS
to unix and vice versa. It seems to happen randomly.
The final issue with VPIX is that the mouse is really weird. IE I
installed Microsoft Word to use a mouse. Under dos I can use a mouse,
but under VPIX it cant even see the mouse! so what's going on here ?
By the way -it was around here that I ran out of free time at ISC, and
they wanted me to buy a pay per question service. Given their track
record to that point this scheme would only be paying for their
vacations while I was running up charges and phone bills and getting
no answers.
I was getting a lot of stroking -what I needed was a lot of answers. I
got a few answers but not enough to warrant my spending a whole month on
and off the phone with them just trying to straighten out the above
issues.
I still cant use my mouse in VPIX -and dont know why. (yes the vpix.cnf
is set up as required)
Finally they shipped me a newer version of X. The package I got had a
note that X would be shipped later rather than give me an old one. So I
got a mishmash of release notes (saying that I really had 1.2 regardless
of what the three different sets of notes say) all claiming to be the
true successors to 1.1, and 1.0.
I called up looking for help with this and got told that my free time
was up... The argument that I didn't even have the software to work with
meant nothing. In all fairness -they were willing to answer 1 more question, but
really my time was up so too bad.
Well I got Xwindows up without tcp/ip installed. I then tried to run
lookingglass (which I had but which requires X to even run) AND GOT A
SURPRISE. The goddam package had the gall to say that I needed to run
tcp/ip in order to use lookingglass. It didn't say that straight out,
but by virtue of not having sockets it barfed all over the place. Even
though X was up and running and that was the only prerequisite I was
told I needed. So I made another phone call, and they answered, but they
told me I needed to reinstall TCP/IP to get looking glass to work.
(So now I feel like I have been the butt of a 3 stooges movie
-actually more like a cross between catch 22 and the terminator.)
OK I put TCP/IP back in -now mail breaks in a strange way. It doesnt
understand addresses like sun!abc@xyz. If I use the new mailx it bitches
about the lack of pathaliases. If I dont it complains about not finding
sun as one of my "hosts" agghh. Im lost. I admit it. It looks like installing
and deinstalling packages isn't clean, and I might have to go back to a virgin
install and start from scratch -gawd I hope not.
WORSE yet. Now I cant even get X windows to come up. IT complains about
waiting for an Xserver to connect to. SO ONE MORE TIME I STRIP OUT
TCP/IP (I know Im shouting). Now mail is still broken, and X is still
complaining about the lack of a server. SO I reinstall X, and
reconfigure mail. No luck. I have no idea what to do from here. The
underlying X screen comes up, the mouse moves, but no xterm ....
and a message saying "waiting for Xserver to respond .............. "
.... and at this time I must have been
so confused from all the preceding
events that I let go of the rope, and
the barrel fell on my head ...
SO any help at all would be good. Thanks
Richard Karasik
E-Mail ...sun!kass!richard
richard@octel.com