ISC 2.0.2 async support

[John R. Levine]

In article <9046 at attctc.Dallas.TX.US> cassidy at attctc.Dallas.TX.US (Cassidy Lynar) writes:
>I have recently purchased the ISC 386/ix 2.0.2 package, and I find that it is
>very much broke! Getty will not spawn a process to a modem, uugetty doesn't
>work either. ...

I think that 2.0.2 is a pretty good package, but the async support, to put
it politely, stinks.  Highly credible sources tell me that the uugetty
shipped is an obsolete one; if you get them to recompile it from source and
send it to you, it'll work a lot better.  I have a Telebit PC internal modem
and have had no trouble getting to work as a dialin once I did this:
carefully set the modem's defaults to be "normal" modem control, set the
line in inittab to use the "8bpc9600" line from gettytab, except on that
line delete references to PARENB and replace them with HUPCL.  Then people
have been able to dial in with a TB without much trouble.

However, the input throughput of their asy driver is terrible.  I exchange
news with a nearby Sun, which doesn't win any prizes in the async department
either, but I notice that when I send them stuff with uucp, using the
Telebit's uucp spoofing mode, I can send to them at about 14000 CPS, but
they can send to me at only about 600.  I attribute this entirely to the
poor input driver on /ix.

I recently got a rewritten asy driver from Jim Murray
(jjm%jjmhome at m2c.m2c.org) which seems to work a lot better.  It also has the
wonderful addition of separate incoming and outgoing special files that know
about each other; that is you just spawn a getty on /dev/ttyM01, and you can
uucp out on /dev/tty01 and it does reasonable things to allow only one of
the processes to get the tty.  This way you don't have to fool with uugetty.
The new driver is also supposed to be a lot faster, but I don't yet have
enough experience to say.
-- 
John R. Levine, Segue Software, POB 349, Cambridge MA 02238, +1 617 492 3869
{ima|lotus}!esegue!johnl, johnl at ima.isc.com, Levine at YALE.something
Massachusetts has 64 licensed drivers who are over 100 years old.  -The Globe