Sun-Spots Digest, v6n110
William LeFebvre
Sun-Spots-Request at RICE.EDU
Tue Jun 14 07:49:07 AEST 1988
SUN-SPOTS DIGEST Monday, 13 June 1988 Volume 6 : Issue 110
Today's Topics:
Re: LaserWriter IIs on Suns
Re: X11 & Suntools on a Sun 3/50
Re: slip on Suns
Recommended books, TCP/IP and Ethernet
Philips monitors
release 4.0 and file system performance
Problems with a DELNI on a Sun?
panic 'iechkcca'
freeware draw program for Suns?
what to do after clear_colormap?
modifying 4.0 library?
Info on Large Screens?
wrong shading colors in suncore?
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----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 6 Jun 88 13:57:00 CDT
From: sob at watson.bcm.tmc.edu (Stan Barber)
Subject: Re: LaserWriter IIs on Suns
We have been running our LaserWriter IIs on our Suns for about three
months. We are running Transcript 2.1. We have had no problems. I guess
we are doing something right.
Stan internet: sob at tmc.edu Baylor College of Medicine
Olan uucp: {rice,killer,hoptoad}!academ!sob
Barber Opinions expressed are only mine.
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 6 Jun 88 16:53:21 EDT
From: Neil Movold - DCS User Services <movold at watdcsu.waterloo.edu>
Subject: Re: X11 & Suntools on a Sun 3/50
In v6n85, Isaac Salzman describes a method of creating multiple screens
using X11 and Sunview. The idea appeals to us here at Waterloo as our
Suns do not support dvitool but do support xdvi for previewing dvi output.
I have run through the instructions given by Isaac, but I have run into
some problems :
1) Our 3/50 workstations only ( from what I can tell ) support
bwtwo0 frame buffer in /dev which when used allows output
from the primary window to over write onto the secondary
window. This is alright except for continuously running tools
such as perfmeter and clock or output returned from background
jobs. Can bwtwo1 be generated on a 3/50 ???
2) The other major problem I have is that when I xinit Xwindows
using overview, I loose keyboard control in Suntools. I have
managed to put a menu item in my .rootmenu file that allows
me to reset the keyboard in Suntools, but when I do that I
loose keyboard control in Xwindows. Has anyone run into this
problem, and what possible action can I take to solve the
problem ???
As we do not have many 3/60c, I would like to try and get this thing
running on our 3/50s. Any suggestions would be appreciated....
Neil Movold
Department of Computing Services
University of Waterloo
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
<movold at watdcsu.UWaterloo.ca>
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 6 Jun 88 22:57:55 MDT
From: Mark G. Brown <markb at boulder.colorado.edu>
Subject: Re: slip on Suns
>From: Ned Danieley <ndd at sunbar.mc.duke.edu>
>
>I have installed the slip code that I obtained from the Sun-spots
>archives, and have run into a couple of problems. sunbar is our server,
>and is on our LAN; bme is a remote machine that is slipped to sunbar.
>sunbar and bme seem to communicate just fine (rlogin, rcp, ping), but bme
>can't talk to any of the other machines on our LAN (like dukebar)....
our situation sounds similar. we have a sub-net of suns off-campus served
by wasser, which is connected to sigi on campus via slip, and their
internet addresses are:
128.138.240.4 sigi # vax785, 4.3BSD
128.138.240.2 wasser-gw # sun3/280, SunOS 3.5
128.138.239.1 wasser # sun3/280, SunOS 3.5
we had to treat the slip line as a gateway, and place it on the same
subnet as sigi. here are the corresponding entries in
wasser:/etc/rc.local:
/etc/slattach /dev/ttya 9600
/etc/dstaddr sl0 128.138.240.4
/etc/ifconfig sl0 128.138.240.2 up arp -trailers netmask 0xffffff00
/usr/etc/route add 128.138.240.2 localhost 0
/usr/etc/route add default 128.138.240.2 10
and sigi:/etc/rc.local:
/etc/slattach ttyB1 9600 >/dev/console
ifconfig sl0 inet 128.138.240.4 128.138.239.1 up subarp\
netmask 0xffffff00 >/dev/console
hope this helps.
-markb
Mark G. Brown, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado 80309 (303)-492-3972
markb at sigi.colorado.edu -or- !{nbires|ncar}!boulder!markb
------------------------------
Date: 6 Jun 1988 1852-PDT (Monday)
From: Charles Spurgeon <spurgeon at jessica.stanford.edu>
Subject: Recommended books, TCP/IP and Ethernet
The following is a list of books I wrote up recently. It's meant to help
someone interested in finding material on TCP/IP protocols and Ethernets.
Since that is a task a lot of Sun workstation administrators are faced
with, I thought I'd send the list along.
The list is longish (about 2K words) since I included all the access
information I could find, as well as some annotations.
[[ Well, it's a little longer than that: 13347 bytes. It has been placed
in the archives as "sun-spots/Ethernet.books". It can be retrieved via
anonymous FTP from the host "titan.rice.edu" or via the archive server
with the request "send sun-spots Ethernet.books". For more information
about the archive server, send a mail message containing the word "help"
to the address "archive-server at rice.edu". --wnl ]]
Cheers,
Charles Spurgeon
spurgeon at jessica.stanford.edu
Stanford University Networking and Communications Systems Dept.
June 6, 1988
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 7 Jun 88 11:15:22 CDT
From: gene at uicsl.csl.uiuc.edu (Gene Gardner)
Subject: Philips monitors
Although this information has been offered in previous scattered messages,
the failure-trend is now clearly established so that SUN (Philips) monitor
users can save $100's if not $1000's of unnecessary repair-bills by taking
these suggestions seriously. Please refer to SUNSPOTS msg v6n100 (Philips
monitors-JUST SAY NO!), and v6n102 (Re: SUN monitors hardware problem).
Over the last two or three years...about 10% (15 out of 150 units in our
building) have failed with one, or both of these specific component
failures: i.e. the "flyback transformer", or C-209. Either fault can be
easily and quickly repaired in less than an hour...even at the
user-site....and is so arbitrary that a relatively inexperienced
technician can do it. Note: just in the last two days, I have had two
more "C-209's" open up... one of which was a recent unit (different case,
on its own swivel-base).
Just a brief review: The "flyback" is now available from SUN, or from Dyn
Service Network in San Jose, CA ...for about $65 to $85, and can be
removed through the top cover (only two screws, and a plug-in connector),
and C-209 is on the right-hand PC-board as you face the screen....it can
be loosened and tilted without removing any connectors. C-209 is now an
electrolytic (questionable choice for this application) 10uf-50v....but it
should be replaced with a tantulum. I used 10uf-35v (only 12vdc across it)
and can be tack-soldered on the underside of the PC board. BE SURE to
observe POLARITY. It is permissible to leave the original in place if you
like.
It may sound a little presumptious, but I would suggest that if you screen
all of your faulty Philips monochrome monitors for these two defects, you
will avoid at least half of your expense, not to mention inconvenience and
30-days or more lost-time.
THE PITY OF IT IS, that these appear to be very nice monitors and all the
the ill-will such as described in SUNSPOTS v6n100 could be avoided if SUN
simply stopped stone-walling and adopted a cooperative policy of offering
schematics on the monitor-portion....or at a minimum, offering individual
sub-unit repair, or exchange at reasonable prices. We also have several
of their color monitors which are beatifully designed for quick-easy
sub-unit exchange. We recently had a failure and were able to quickly
determine which sub-unit was bad by interchanging with a good unit. What
a shame that SUN has no exchange, or repair alternative on such
sub-units(much grief and BIG BUCKS would be saved).
[[ Mr. Gardner later sent me this addendum: --wnl ]]
I have had a single failure (so it certainly can't be considered a
failure-trend from our viewpoint) that gives almost exactly the same
symptoms as "open C-209" (Philips monitors): It is a faulty C-207,
(located near C-209). But it must be removed, and should be replaced with
a good-quality (temperature-stable) 1000pf (.001ufd) capacitor.
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 6 Jun 88 21:23:42 EDT
From: dan at wind.bellcore.com (Daniel R. Strick)
Subject: release 4.0 and file system performance
Cpu and possibly other overhead for file system access is way up under
release 4.0 (compared to release 3.x). I just measured a 36% increase in
cpu for reads and a 16% increase for writes (on a sun-3/260 with 8mb main
memory). I don't know how much the increase is likely to vary with the
phase of the moon or what effect this will have on normal timesharing, but
the increase is quite noticeable in disk benchmarks. Peak file system i/o
rates are down from about 1500 kb/sec to about 1200 kb/sec.
The exact source of the new overhead is not clear, but the use of virtual
memory pages for buffers is implicated. Heavy file system i/o consumes
essentially all of free memory, drives the virtual memory scan rate up to
something between 100 and 200, and seems to cause a little paging and
swapping. I don't think this is really the problem. The increase in
memory available for the buffer pool is a big win, but this also creates
an opportunity to spend more cpu browsing through buffer and page lists
(32 mb used to get you 400 buffers; now it gets you about 3500). Lots of
real memory is likely to reduce disk i/o, but it also encourages i/o
patterns easily optimized by smart disk controllers/drivers and it seems a
shame to lose 20% of your peak i/o rates to kernel overhead.
Does anyone think they know exactly where release 4.0 eats the extra cpu
cycles? Processor cache management for DVMA is a cpu pig, but this is not
new in release 4.0. Cpu overhead for disk i/o on 200 series suns is now
approaching 10 times what it is on a vax 8650. I would like to see this
trend reversed.
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 07 Jun 88 09:58:28 -0400
From: lrj at helios.tn.cornell.edu
Subject: Problems with a DELNI on a Sun?
Reference: v6n104, v6n96
> ... Sun says that this is normally caused by
> either broken hardware or some problem with Ethernet cabling (e.g. use of
> a DEC DELNI). ...
What problems are there with DELNI's? I've been running my network for
two years now with a DELNI as an integral part. The current configuration
is 1 DEC DELNI, 3 Cabletron MT-800's (another multiport tranceiver), ~20
Suns and a Proteon P2400 gateway. This has been working fine for quite
some time.
If there are known problems with DELNI's & Suns, what should i look for?
-- Lewis R. Jansen, LASSP Systems Grunt
lrj at helios.tn.cornell.edu
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 6 Jun 88 20:19:29 PDT
From: Stuart Cracraft <cracraft at hyper-sun1.jpl.nasa.gov>
Subject: panic 'iechkcca'
There seems to be a recurring panic, known about by SUN, that is fairly
subtle -- the symptom is that NFS fails with a 'getattr' error and within
a short period of time thereafter, one or more SUN's that remote-mount a
filesystem from the SUN about which the 'getattr' was reported will panic
with the 'iechkcca'.
All I have gotten so far from SUN is that this may be related, somehow, to
the Xylogics disk controller on the SUN exporting the NFS filesystem.
Has anyone else observed this? This is a fairly irksome occurrence because
it can have wide implications on local networks. Can SUN comment further
on this and what their plans are to provide a work-around or preferably a
fix?
Stuart
[[ Charles Hedrick says that an iechkcca panic happens when the Intel
Ethernet controller chip does not acknowledge a command after a reasonable
amount of time: either because of broken hardware or an Ethernet cabling
problem. He also said that he believes it can happen when all the
hardware is fine. He also recommends calling the support group at
800-USA-4SUN. See Sun-Spots digest v6n104 for hsi recent posting on this
subject. --wnl ]]
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 6 Jun 88 15:27:22 PDT
From: celeste at coherent.com (Celeste C. Stokely)
Subject: freeware draw program for Suns?
Does anyone have a free drawing program for Suns, under at least 3.4,
under Sunview, able to input and output Sun raster files? Something like
MacPaint functionality would be fabulous. The "gwpaint" on the '85 SUG
tape isn't exactly robust.
Ok to tell me to RTFArchives if there's a paint program waiting for me there.
..Celeste Stokely
Coherent Thought Inc.
UUCP: ...!{ames,sun,uunet}!coherent!celeste Domain: celeste at coherent.com
Internet: coherent!celeste at ames.arpa or ... at sun.com or ... at uunet.uu.net
VOX: 415-493-8805
SNAIL:3350 W. Bayshore Rd. #205, Palo Alto CA 94303
[[ The archives contains two programs that might interest you. A
M*cDraw-like program called "fig" and a M*cPaint-like program called
"touchup". Fig is in nine shar files, named fig.shar.0X (for 1<=X<=9) and
touchup is in 6 shar files, named touchup.shar.X (for 1<=X<=6). They are
all in the "sun-source" directory of the archives and 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: 7 Jun 88 01:45:45 GMT
From: mkhaw at teknowledge-vaxc.arpa (Mike Khaw)
Subject: what to do after clear_colormap?
Is there any graceful way to recover after a "clear_colormap" (SunOS 3.5)
turns the screen blank white -- if you were running suntools and now have
no mouse pointer?
Thanks,
Mike Khaw
internet: mkhaw at teknowledge.arpa
uucp: {uunet|sun|ucbvax|decwrl|uw-beaver}!mkhaw%teknowledge-vaxc.arpa
hardcopy: Teknowledge Inc, 1850 Embarcadero Rd, POB 10119, Palo Alto, CA 94303
------------------------------
Date: 7 Jun 88 02:58:47 GMT
From: hedrick at athos.rutgers.edu (Charles Hedrick)
Subject: modifying 4.0 library?
We are trying to bring up 4.0 this summer. Unfortunately, we don't have
source yet, and based on past experience, we have to assume it's going to
be a while before we can get it. One very high priority change is to
modify gethostbyname and friends so it uses the domain resolver instead of
yp. In the past it was easy to replace a few routines in libc.a: ar could
simply be told to replace them. However now we've got this libc.so thing.
Anybody
- know how to replace a couple of modules in such a file
- know how to build libc.so from libc.a
- have a copy of libc.so with the resolver routines instead of
the usual yp junk?
I know there is a libresolv, but since we don't have source to the
utilities either, we can't relink the existing system software to use it.
So the only hope I can think of is to fix the sharable library and hope
that all the system software is linked -Bdynamic.
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 7 Jun 88 08:38:40 PDT
From: smith at phylo.life.uiuc.edu (Steven Smith)
Subject: Info on Large Screens?
I'm currently working with the University of Illinois Department of
Microbiology, and we are in the process of designing a large scale DNA
Sequence editor/analysis package. Our specifications require that we be
able to display huge amounts of text at one time (on the order of 300x100
characters). Although our current displays can come close to this level,
it is accomplished by means of using smaller fonts. This method is not
very practical for long term use because of eye strain. Does anyone know
of any third party companies that sell larger displays for the sun?
2000x2000 resolution would be optimal, and color or grey scale prefered.
Any responses are welcome, company addresses and/or phone numbers
prefered.
Thank you,
Steven Smith
U of Illinois, Microbiology
smith at phylo.life.uiuc.edu
ssmith at ncsavmsa.bitnet
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 07 Jun 88 17:17:47 MEZ
From: TS36 at DFVLRGO1.BITNET
Subject: wrong shading colors in suncore?
Using the SUN-CORE graphics a lot of mysterious this happen to me. One is
very essential: I use the SetVertexIndices routine to define the color of
a polygon. Then I draw a PolygonAbs3 using the Gouraud shade. Now rotate
that thing with SetSegImgXform3 and it appears in arbitrary color.
Somehow the color seems to depend on the angle of rotation. all this
happens when I initialize the cgpixwindd. if i run the same program but
initialize gp1pixwindd everything is perfect and all colors appear as they
should do.
OK, I really don't expect to find anybody who knows a solution to this
problem. Even so I would very much appreachiate if I could. But as
people at SUN in Germany tend to tell me that I am the only one in the
world with such strange encounters, I would be glad to get notes from
people who have the same or similar or even different problems with
SUN-CORE May be one day we are enough people to encourage SUN to fix the
problem. hoping for e-mail
schorsch pagendarm
dfvlr
bunsenstr.10
3400 goettingen
federal republic of germany
TS36 at dfvlrgo1.bitnet
------------------------------
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