Sun-Spots Digest, v6n53
William LeFebvre
Sun-Spots-Request at RICE.EDU
Sat Apr 16 09:57:45 AEST 1988
SUN-SPOTS DIGEST Friday, 15 April 1988 Volume 6 : Issue 53
Today's Topics:
Administrivia
Re: TCPDUMP for SunOS 4.0
Re: Filters for fig
Re: Does anyone have Calctool V2.1? Other calculators?
Re: Implementations of PHIGS and GKS
Re: Problems configuring cua0 on a 3/160
Dialin/out on one port
newfs/mkfs inode shortage problem
Likely autoinitialization bug
A question about NFS hierarchies
screen dumping?
Adding a third Eagle?
Conference room sized color displays?
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----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Fri, 15 Apr 88 13:54:25 CDT
From: William LeFebvre <phil at Rice.edu>
Subject: Administrivia
My apologies to all who have been patiently waiting for me to process
requests. I have just processed all the pending requests (and some of
them dated back to the middle of March, I'm afraid). Everyone has now
been added or deleted as they requested, with the exception of the Bitnet
folks---I'm still working on that. Once again, I'm sorry that I took so
long to get around to it.
The archive's copy of Volume 6 issue 50 was empty. This has been fixed.
The indexes are all up to date now. I hope to have a marathon sun-spots
party this weekend and digestify the entire backlog of messages. Then I
can put them out at my leisure during the coming week. There are 213695
bytes waiting to be processed, the oldest one is from April 6. I was down
to a week turn-around time, but then things got busy and I went a few days
without assembling any digests. Thank you for your patience.
William LeFebvre
Department of Computer Science
Rice University
<phil at Rice.edu>
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 04 Apr 88 22:09:06 PDT
From: Craig Leres <leres%lbl-helios at lbl-rtsg.arpa>
Subject: Re: TCPDUMP for SunOS 4.0
Reference: v6n41
The nit interface changed quite a bit between 3.X and 4.0 Sun OS. In any
case, tcpdump probably won't get converted to 4.0 until we start running
4.0 on our Suns...
Remember, until Sun says it's ok, we can't give you the tcpdump source
(under any circumstances). Please don't ask.
Craig
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 5 Apr 88 14:05:39 BST
From: everson%COMPSCI.BRISTOL.AC.UK at cunyvm.cuny.edu
Subject: Re: Filters for fig
Reference: v6n37
> I have just retrieved Fig from the archive. My difficulty is the filter
> supplied (f2p) is for pic. Does anyone have a suitable filter for TeX or
> LaTeX?...
What is needed is a fig to postscript filter as the postscript can then be
included into the TeX/LaTeX file using the \special command. We have such
a beast here; however, it is encoded by a program atob which we do not
have. If you have a copy of atob or alternatively if you have got a copy
of a filter from somewhere else please send me a copy of the source!
This multiplicity of formats is *very* frustrating!
Phill Everson
University of Bristol, UK
[[ The new version of Fig (1.4) comes with a fig->postscript converter
(called (f2ps). Now if only I could find the time to bundle it up and put
it in the archives.... By the way, all you fig fans will be "pleased" to
hear (I'm being sarcastic) that the fig file format changed with version
1.4 and is incompatible with the old format, although I understand that
1.4 will read old format files. --wnl ]]
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 05 Apr 88 16:03:07 -0400
From: mesard at bbn.com
Subject: Re: Does anyone have Calctool V2.1? Other calculators?
> Does anyone out there have the complete and correct sources?...
I have Calctool 2.1. Let me know if you haven't gotten it yet, and I'll
mail it (or the parts you're missing) to you.
> In a more general light, can anyone recommend a good *scientific*
> calculator program (not necessarily just for SUN's)?...
I also have a command line (i.e. non visual) calc program that I wrote
which I use all the time and love dearly. It does things like
% calc "tan 45 / (5 % 3)"
0.5
Support exists for trig and other functions, math and bitwise operations,
hex, octal, binary and ascii representations, precision as high as your C
math library and hardware will go. (Which is ~16 decimal digits as I
[mis]understand the IEEE double precision standard.)
I just uploaded a shar with the source files and man page for this program
to titan.rice.edu. I'm cc'ing this message to wnl to let him know and to
tell him to do what he will with it.
[[ It has been moved to "public/wsm_calc.shar". I decided that, since it
was not Sun-related, it didn't really belong in sun-source. But don't
worry, archive server users can still retrieve it with "send public
wsm_calc.shar". It is 21234 bytes in length. --wnl ]]
MESARD at BBN.COM
BBN Labs, Cambridge, MA
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 6 Apr 88 11:11:59 EDT
From: bob at allosaur.cis.ohio-state.edu (Bob Sutterfield)
Subject: Re: Implementations of PHIGS and GKS
Reference: v6n42
Look in the directory doc/PEX in the release 2 distribution of the X
Window System, Version 11. Therein is the PEX Protocol Specification, the
result of work by the X3D committee on 3-D extensions to the X11 protocol.
Their description of a PEX resource called a "PHIGS workstation" begins on
page 101. It may take you in a direction you want to go.
Bob Sutterfield, Department of Computer and Information Science
The Ohio State University; 2036 Neil Ave. Columbus OH USA 43210-1277
bob at cis.ohio-state.edu or ...!cbosgd!osu-cis!bob
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 4 Apr 88 15:35:24 MST
From: hyder at blueox@hub.ucsb.edu
Subject: Re: Problems configuring cua0 on a 3/160
The detailed information provided about modems and cua0 in this reply is
interesting but not quite correct for SunOS users. It is quite possible,
thanks to the device driver supplied by Sun, to use the same modem for
dial in and dial out. Honest, it works just fine. (The discussion of
modem lines that was given relates mostly to more generic 4.nBSD
implementations.)
The bi-directional mode works IFF(sic) you configure everything EXACTLY as
described in the adding a modem section of the reference manuals. (It may
also help to find notes from the Sun System Administrator's course and
look at them but the reference manual has better detail.)
YES, a minor kernel reconfig is required.
THE CATCHES:
1. The modem !MUST! be configured properly. Almost all of
the problems I've seen have been the result of incorrect
modem switch settings. If you have a real Hayes modem the
switch settings are in the Sun manuals.
2. The instructions are for the ttya and ttyb ports and
some of the add-on RS-232 cards may not be as easy to
configure for use. (believe the initial problem report
is related to one of these)
Give it a try. A modem set up this way is particularly useful for
restricted line environments and on outbound modems that are rarely used,
like only for UUCP at 3am.
Paul Hyder
Blue Ox Software, Inc.
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 4 Apr 88 22:22:16 PDT
From: ho at tis-w.arpa (Hilarie K. Orman)
Subject: Dialin/out on one port
Reference: v6n43
In v6n43 Ron Hitchens gives an analysis of the /dev/cua0 mechanism ending
with the depressing conclusion:
"Unfortunately there is no simple method to use one modem for both dialin
and dialout like you're trying to do. The setup as it exists doesn't
allow it ..."
Having followed the instructions in the Sun system administrators' guide
for adding a modem to the system, I can testify that one modem can most
definitely be used for both dial-in and dial-out. The trick is the
"flags" parameter in the kernel configuration for the device. This
activates a mutual exclusion mechanism between devices with matching major
device numbers and minor device numbers differing by 128 (just one bit).
Init waits for activity on one device, dial-out uses the other. Now,
there must be a little bit of magic going on here, because somehow init
manages to get away with not doing an open on its device, merely getting
notified when carrier is detected, then doing the open. Nonetheless, the
bottom line is, if you have followed the instructions and are still having
problems, then the fault is in the modem. It must be able to use the
signal lines to notify the CPU about carrier detect, and it must be able
to drop carrier when the CPU drops DTR. Usually a little in-line test
device will tell the whole story.
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 04 Apr 88 19:06:39 PDT
From: Craig Leres <leres%lbl-helios at lbl-rtsg.arpa>
Subject: newfs/mkfs inode shortage problem
Over the months, several people have complained that they don't end up
with enough inodes when they make a new filesystem under Sun OS. I ran
into this difficultly when I put news/nntp up on my file server.
The problem seems to be that newer drives tend to have many more sectors
per cyclnder. For example, the standard 70 Mbyte Micropolis 1325 that
comes with a "shoebox" only has 136 sectors/cyclnder while my 600 Mbyte
Fujitsu 2344's have 1890 sectors/cyclnder. With these newer big drives,
the default number of cylinders per cylinder group (16) is too large.
Since you're limited to 2048 inodes per cylinder group, if you don't have
enough cylinder groups, you're out of luck. The workaround we came up with
was to specify 8 cylinders/group to newfs (using -c 8). We really wanted 4
cylinders/group to get the desired inode density of 2 Kbytes/inode, but
there's some other filesystem limitation that force cylinders/group to be
a multiple of 8. Still, this yields twice as many inodes.
Hope this helps.
Craig
------------------------------
Date: 5 Apr 88 21:36:06 GMT
From: ncar!boulder!stcvax!stc-auts!kak at rutgers.edu (Kris Kugel)
Subject: Likely autoinitialization bug
[[ This was "cross-posted" to several Usenet groups. There may already be
discussions about this going on in comp.lang.c. --wnl ]]
/* showbug
* compile: cc showbug.c -o showbug -lm
*/
main()
{
float mean = 0.035000;
int samples = 200;
{
double sigma = sqrt( (mean*(1 - mean))/ samples);
printf("sigma = sqrt( (%f)/%d) ",
(mean*(1 - mean)), samples );
printf("= sqrt( %f ) ",
(mean*(1 - mean))/ samples );
printf("= %f ",
sqrt((mean*(1 - mean))/ samples ));
printf("= %f (!)\n", sigma );
}
}
the Autoinitialization of sigma fails on every system I've tried it on so
far, (sun, bsd2.10, ATT3b1/3.51, ultrix) (even on bsd2.10, sigma is
different, although both are wrong)
Does anyone know what is going on here? Is this a bug?
Kris A. Kugel
Storage Tek: ...{ uunet!nbires, ncar, ihnp4 }!stcvax!stc-auts!kak
------------------------------
Date: 6 Apr 88 02:00:33 GMT
From: helios!lalonde at uunet.uu.net (Terry Lalonde)
Subject: A question about NFS hierarchies
Consider the following:
A diskless machine (A) mounts a filesystem on machine (B) at /usr and
another filesystem on machine (C) at /usr/machc.
i.e. mount machineB:/usr/sun3 /usr
mount machineC:/usr/machc /usr/machc
Question: Is this an inefficient to do things?
Does this make I/O to a file on /usr/machc dependent
on both (B) and (C) and their loads?
Thanks,
Terry
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 05 Apr 88 14:18:23 EDT
From: jfjr at mitre-bedford.arpa
Subject: screen dumping?
I am a new user. If this deserves an RTFM I'll take it but try to do it
nicely I am sensitive.
We have a Sun 3 and we are doing some "interactive" plotting. At the end
of the plot program we just go
system(screendump | rasfilter8to1 |lpr -v).
Most of the time this works but if someone else is logged in from another
terminal somethings get all confused. Sometimes it tells me that "valloc"
failed. Sometimes there are problems with "pix_rect", sometimes with
/dev/fb.
Is there anything I can do?? or should I live with it??
Jerry Freedman,Jr
jfjr at mitre-bedford.arpa
------------------------------
Date: 5 Apr 88 14:30:42 GMT
From: roy%phri at uunet.uu.net (Roy Smith)
Subject: Adding a third Eagle?
Has anybody tried putting more than 2 drives per controller on a
Sun-3/180? We've got two 180s, each with two eagles and a single XY-450
controller. I've also got a fifth eagle sitting in a box (long story)
waiting to be made useful. The XY board can supposedly handle up to 4
drives but the kernel driver won't support than many. Is there some good
reason why not?
Lacking any way to wedge a third drive onto an existing controller, what
suggestions do people have for a new controller? For now, all I want to
put on it is a plain old eagle, but at some time in the future we'll
probably want to support bigger, faster drives. Is it really worth it to
get one of those fancy new buffer-a-cylinder-at-a-time controllers as
opposed to something like a plain old XY-451?
Roy Smith, {allegra,cmcl2,philabs}!phri!roy
System Administrator, Public Health Research Institute
455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 5 Apr 88 17:23:03 EDT
From: mstan!s2!dpk at uunet.uu.net (Douglas P. Kingston)
Subject: Conference room sized color displays?
We are looking for a large high resolution color display suitable for use
in a conference room. We would like it to be a projection system of some
sort. We have heard of the GE Lightvalve (?) but I believe that is a bit
large (and expensive for our needs (a 50 seat conference room). The
standard Sun display options are too small. Any pointers would be
welcome.
It would be a plus if it could also display the lower resolution PC
graphics, but this is not a requirement.
-Doug-
dpk at morgan.com (or dpk at brl.arpa)
------------------------------
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