Sun-Spots Digest, v6n137
William LeFebvre
Sun-Spots-Request at RICE.EDU
Fri Jul 15 03:03:05 AEST 1988
SUN-SPOTS DIGEST Wednesday, 13 July 1988 Volume 6 : Issue 137
Today's Topics:
Re: Deliver mail to receiver's login directory
Re: max filesystem size under 4.0
more 4.0 follies
security
Calctool fix
Upgrade poll results
Comments and questions about Suntools under 4.0
Sun IPC question
graphical SunView panel editor?
Course schedule for SUN Training?
documentation for the Sun Macro Package tmac.sun?
is the 386i fully source compatible with Sun-3s?
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----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Sat, 2 Jul 88 14:51:39 BST
From: Andrew Findlay <Andrew.Findlay%brunel.ac.uk at nss.cs.ucl.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: Deliver mail to receiver's login directory
Reference: v6n120
In Sun-Spots digest v6n120, Howard Gayle suggets putting mail in user
login directories.
At Brunel University (UK) we do exactly that. Mail is delivered into a
file called '.mailbox', by a program that understands the odd things that
might happen to soft-mounted NFS filesystems. We use modified versions of
elm and Mail (which also supports mailtool). There is a new
mail-notification service to make sure that users get told about arriving
mail even if they are not logged on to the machine doing the delivery.
The home-directory mail system is now running on two Pyramids and a number
of Suns at Brunel.
If there is sufficient interest, I can supply source for the delivery and
notification programs. The modifications to Mail and elm may be more
difficult, as Sun source code is required to recompile Mail and our
version of elm is now out of date. I am about to start work on elm version
1.7, so in due course I should be able to supply diffs.
Andrew
Andrew Findlay at Brunel University, Uxbridge, UB8 3PH, UK
Andrew.Findlay at brunel.ac.uk phone: +44 895 74000 x2512
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 5 Jul 88 11:50:50 EDT
From: dpz at njin.rutgers.edu (David P. Zimmerman)
Subject: Re: max filesystem size under 4.0
From: dms at wheaties.ai.mit.edu (David M. Siegel)
Does anyone know if Sun fixed the bug in OS 3.X that limited filesystems
to be under 512 Mbytes?
Seems to be, if having a Hitachi 900Mb drive as a single 900Mb partition
signifies being fixed. We've got this on a Sun 4/280 running 4.0.
^David
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 4 Jul 88 23:12:10 EDT
From: hedrick at aramis.rutgers.edu (Charles Hedrick)
Subject: more 4.0 follies
It appears that the 4.0 boot code uses a 16-byte buffer to store the host
name for the server. This explains why one site had to go from
foo.bar.edu to foo. We noticed this when boot crashed with an illegal
memory reference. The address it was trying to dereference turned out to
be ASCII /EDU / So it's fairly clear that the host name simply overwrote
an adjacent pointer. Host name fields should be at least 256 bytes, or
even better, dynamically allocated. But for the moment, if you're going
to move to 4.0, your diskless machines had better have host names that are
less than 16 bytes. (You have to allow one byte for a trailing null, I
presume.) [Didn't I post this before to sun-spots? I could have sworn I
had, but a message in 6:126 suggests that it didn't get out.]
Also, the infamous out of band data byte bug is with us again. We have to
fix this in every release. The symptom is that when you rlogin between
two 4.0 machines and enter Emacs, half the time ^S will freeze output
rather than search. rlogind sends an out of band message telling rlogin
to turn off xon/xoff processing. However a bug in uipc_socket prevents
the message from getting through about half the time. It's worse on
connections with a speed imbalance (with rlogind machine faster than the
rlogin machine, as I recall). A 3/50 talking to a 4/280 sometimes fails
all the time. We did send this fix to sunbugs about a year ago. We'll do
it again when we get source to 4.0 and can develop an appropriate fix.
This time I'll follow the advice I've gotten from various friends and send
the fix directly to friends within Sun. It appears that when the
bozo-catchers don't understand a bug report, it gets dropped. For the
moment we're telling users to use telnet instead of rlogin.
Anybody know when source to 4.0 will be shipped? We're trying to get 4.0
up by Sept, since otherwise we have to wait until January. This requires
us to get source within a couple of weeks. We can hardly give users an OS
where rlogin doesn't work, and there are a few other serious things that
we have to fix as well. Presumably other universities are in the same
position. I know there's a feeling in industry that "universities don't
understand deadlines", but I tell ya, there's no way we can slip the start
of classes... There aren't many vendors that I can count on to know what
a hard deadline like that means.
------------------------------
Date: 4 Jul 88 17:38 -0700
From: honman <honman%cmpt.sfu.cdn at ean.ubc.ca>
Subject: security
Is there a special mailing list for system administrators to discuss
security holes in SUN's OS? We have found 2 security holes with SUN's OS
but do not know how to relate the information to other system
administrators. We have informed our local SUN technical support, whom we
believe have related the information to other SUN technical supports.
However, the information doesn't seem to have been passed on to other
system adminstrators.
Hon-Man Wong
Manager, Software Systems
School of Computing Science
Simon Fraser University
Burnaby, B.C.
CANADA V5A 1S6
Email: honman at cmpt.sfu.cdn
...!ubc.cs!fornax!honman
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 30 Jun 88 09:07:41 EDT
From: Chuck Musciano <chuck at trantor.harris-atd.com>
Subject: Calctool fix
I have found the cause of the window layout problem in calctool described
in my last message to Sun-Spots. It turns out that I created the key
window with the attribute WIN_COLUMNS set to 45. The window is created by
taking the width of the default font, and multiplying by 45. If your
default font is not 8 pixels wide, you will have problems. A simple fix
is to modify the creation of the keys window to set WIN_WIDTH to 360.
This is the width in pixels, and is invariant between machines. A patch
to do just this follows.
Chuck Musciano
Advanced Technology Department
Harris Corporation
(407) 727-6131
ARPA: chuck at trantor.harris-atd.com
#! /bin/sh
# This is a shell archive. Remove anything before this line, then unpack
# it by saving it into a file and typing "sh file". To overwrite existing
# files, type "sh file -c". You can also feed this as standard input via
# unshar, or by typing "sh <file", e.g.. If this archive is complete, you
# will see the following message at the end:
# "End of shell archive."
# Contents: patch
# Wrapped by chuck at melmac on Thu Jun 30 09:07:19 1988
PATH=/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/ucb ; export PATH
if test -f 'patch' -a "${1}" != "-c" ; then
echo shar: Will not clobber existing file \"'patch'\"
else
echo shar: Extracting \"'patch'\" \(583 characters\)
sed "s/^X//" >'patch' <<'END_OF_FILE'
X*** screen.c Thu Jun 30 08:58:50 1988
X--- screen.c.new Thu Jun 30 08:59:01 1988
X***************
X*** 142,148 ****
X sw = window_create(bf, PANEL, 0);
X display = window_create(bf, CANVAS, 0);
X keys = window_create(bf, PANEL,
X! WIN_COLUMNS, 45,
X PANEL_ACCEPT_KEYSTROKE, TRUE,
X PANEL_BACKGROUND_PROC, kb_proc,
X 0);
X--- 142,148 ----
X sw = window_create(bf, PANEL, 0);
X display = window_create(bf, CANVAS, 0);
X keys = window_create(bf, PANEL,
X! WIN_WIDTH, 360,
X PANEL_ACCEPT_KEYSTROKE, TRUE,
X PANEL_BACKGROUND_PROC, kb_proc,
X 0);
END_OF_FILE
if test 583 -ne `wc -c <'patch'`; then
echo shar: \"'patch'\" unpacked with wrong size!
fi
# end of 'patch'
fi
echo shar: End of shell archive.
exit 0
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 29 Jun 88 01:54:50 MDT
From: dieter at titan.nmt.edu
Subject: Upgrade poll results
First, an apology. About the same time as my poll appeared in Sun-Spots,
our network connection went on vacation for a week or so. Even when it
came back, our domain wasn't registered with the Internet folks, so
getting mail to me was much harder than I'd thought it would be. Thank
you to those hardy souls who refused to take "network unreachable" as an
answer.
Anyway, here is a summary of the 14 responses to my survey about the
usability of Sun upgrade and installation scripts. This summary basically
gives an idea of reactions to the scripts. At the end of this note I am
including the actual survey responses, plus a posting by Chug Von Rospach
at Sun that I grabbed from comp.sources.d. Since the survey responses
total about 26Kb (577 lines), they should probably be put into the
archives.
Rich Baughman (rich at cfisun.cfi.com) gave a critique of the SunOS 4.0
script and documentation. If you haven't done that upgrade yet but are
planning on it, I'd recommend reading through his comments.
Most people were (surprise!) under-impressed with the scripts provided and
thus did part or all of the work by hand. The general consensus seems to
be reflected in this statement by Steven Tylock, tylock at cs.buffalo.edu: "A
pain to use. Installation can not be done with 3'rd party equipment. ...I
try to get away with dd'ing off the tapes, and installing myself. I don't
have to worry about bugs in the procedure, only my own quirks..." Some
used tar instead of dd, but the sentiments remain.
A question by Rich Baughman, rich at cfi.com: "I am curious to find out if
these problems are mostly us, or are real gurus also being frustrated?"
Gurus don't get frustrated, they do it their way :-).
Mitchell F. Wyle, wyle%ifi.ethz.ch at relay.cs.net, did give an interesting
perspective though. "I find sun software no harder to run than DOS
upgrades or DOS configuration. RSX-11 sysgen was a nightmare." Remind me
not to buy a RSX-11 system :-).
And yes, there are some lucky souls out there who "...ran the 3.4 upgrade
scripts for our 3/52's (and our 3/160's too I think), with no problems."
(Olaf Pors, op at bigfoot.acc.virginia.edu). Mr. Pors was the only person to
report having absolutely no problems. He didn't say anything about
diskful/diskless, nor if they also upgraded their file servers (assuming
they have them).
The other positive comments were similar to Steve Platt's
(steve at mrc-apu.cam.ac.uk) "Anyway, it wasnt too bad, considering ... we
were able to carry on almost immediately."
I hope this has been enlightening. If not, please send constructive
criticism to me. Thank you.
[[ The complete collection of responses to the survey has been placed in
the archives under "sun-spots" as "script.survey". It is 28199 bytes
long. It can be retrieved via anonymous FTP from the host
"titan.rice.edu" or via the archive server. For more information about
the archive server, send a mail message containing the word "help" to the
address "archive-server at rice.edu". --wnl ]]
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 5 Jul 88 09:20:16 EDT
From: petemackay at lynx.northeastern.edu
Subject: Comments and questions about Suntools under 4.0
I have recently installed SunOS 4.0 on our 3/110, and noticed that
Suntools had been revised. I like the new menus, but they do take further
wrist practice to master. I'm also adjusting to the new Mac-like
confirmation windows - will a lawsuit follow? :-)
One thing that keeps happening (a bug already?): After I select an option
(such as split view in textedit or quit a tool), the pointer turns white
and can't be easily seen! Has this been happening to anyone else? It's
not easily proved because it's totally un-predictable and seemingly
random. Any clues?
Pete MacKay Internet: petemackay at lynx.northeastern.edu
Analog Devices Phone: 461-4099
3 Technology Way
Norwood, MA 02062
------------------------------
Date: 4 Jul 88 20:55:05 GMT
From: rutgers!sun1.cs.uh.edu!mkkam at handies.ucar.edu (Francis Kam)
Subject: Sun IPC question
Whenever I run pctool with pc0 enabled for the Sun IPC board on a 260, the
system keeps receiving "level 2 interrupts" in such a way that it looks
like it's dead (keep printing level 2 interrupt message). Also, IPC Rel
1.1 doesn't seem to work with subnetting. We're currently running OS 3.5.
If anyone out there has experience in installing IPC and accessing it from
a remote workstation, please give me some hints.
Thank you.
Francis Kam Computer Science Department
Internet: mkkam at wael.cs.uh.edu University of Houston
CSNET: mkkam at houston.csnet 4800 Calhoun
Phone: (713)749-1748 Houston, TX 77004.
------------------------------
Date: Sat, 2 Jul 88 13:18:19 EDT
From: "Mark Phillips (RD Goldman)" <mbp at sofya.umd.edu>
Subject: graphical SunView panel editor?
Does anyone have a program for interactively creating and editing SunView
panels? I spend an enormous amount of time trying to get items
positioned in my panels in a way that looks nice and is easy to use. It
seems that this process could be streamlined by an interactive program
which allows you to create and edit panel items with the mouse. It could
also allow various panel and panel item attributes to be specified during
the construction. The final output would be a file with the C code for
generating the panel. Any ideas?
Mark Phillips
Department of Mathematics
University of Maryland at College Park
mbp%julia.umd.edu at eneevax.umn.edu
------------------------------
Date: Sun, 3 Jul 88 12:52:06 -0200
From: Yaakov Itzikowitz <yi at WISDOM.BITNET>
Subject: Course schedule for SUN Training?
Hi, Does anybody have the course schedule of SUN for Unix internals and
device drive writing for the next 6-9 months, courses that will take place
in the USA ? Thanks,
Yaakov
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 5 Jul 88 11:04:05 +0200
From: unido!stollco!til at uunet.uu.net (tilgner)
Subject: documentation for the Sun Macro Package tmac.sun?
We are using troff with -ms macro set for our documentation purposes. Now
I realised that SUN supplied a modified version -msun "The Sun Macro
Package", including some useful stuff for generating table of contents,
indexes etc. But, however, it is a hard job to analyze the code for
finding out how to use it. Is there a documentation anywhere?
Michael
------------------------------
Date: 5 Jul 88 00:45:17 GMT
From: E.Wilkinson at massey.ac.nz (Edward Wilkinson)
Subject: is the 386i fully source compatible with Sun-3s?
The subject just about says it all! I've seen a lovely range of
graphics goodies for the Sun-3 series of machines & am wondering
whether these can be run on the Roadrunner. If not, are they easily
convertable? Sorry if this has been asked before.
Ed Wilkinson @ Computer Centre, Massey University, Palmerston North, NZ
uucp: {uunet,watmath!cantuar}!vuwcomp!csvaxa!edward DTE: 530163000005
Janet/Greybook: E.Wilkinson at nz.ac.massey Phone: +64 63 69099 x8587
CSnet/ACSnet/Internet: E.Wilkinson at massey.ac.nz New Zealand = GMT+12
[[ The byte ordering is different between the two machines. And I am sure
that there are other architectural differences. So the answer is "only if
the program is well written". --wnl ]]
------------------------------
End of SUN-Spots Digest
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