Sun-Spots Digest, v6n81
William LeFebvre
Sun-Spots-Request at RICE.EDU
Thu May 12 05:24:45 AEST 1988
SUN-SPOTS DIGEST Tuesday, 10 May 1988 Volume 6 : Issue 81
Today's Topics:
Re: SLIP for Sun
Re: Non-printing use of "lpr" queueing mechanism: MDQS
Need suggestions ... quick
SunOS 4.0 "features"
multi-level domain names and more on SunOS 4.0
Need help with YP Server setup
3/60 as a server?
ESTALE?
dvitool?
TeXsun?
Send contributions to: sun-spots at rice.edu
Send subscription add/delete requests to: sun-spots-request at rice.edu
Bitnet readers can subscribe directly with the CMS command:
TELL LISTSERV AT RICE SUBSCRIBE SUNSPOTS My Full Name
Recent backissues are available via anonymous FTP from "titan.rice.edu".
For volume X, issue Y, "get sun-spots/vXnY". They are also accessible
through the archive server: mail the request "send sun-spots vXnY" to
"archive-server at rice.edu" or mail the word "help" to the same address
for more information.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Thu, 05 May 88 12:25:22 MST
From: lyndon%ncc at uunet.uu.net
Subject: Re: SLIP for Sun
You should also consider obtaining the latest release of the internet code
from 4.3BSD. It contains a much improved SLIP driver, and is already set
up for installation on binary-only Sun's.
The complete source code was posted to comp.bug.4bsd.fixes, and is also
available via ftp from ucbvax and uunet.
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 5 May 88 13:01:52 PDT
From: rusty%math.Berkeley.EDU at cartan.berkeley.edu
Subject: Re: Non-printing use of "lpr" queueing mechanism: MDQS
You might look into the MDQS software package. It was done by (I think)
Doug Kingston at BRL. If you have access to the internet you can get it
via ftp from vgr.brl.mil (192.5.23.6). MDQS stands for "Multi Device
Queueing System". It provides a "many to many" mapping between devices
and queues (as opposed to the one to one mapping that the BSD lpr
provides). For example, with it you can have 1 printer queue drained by
several printers. It's a very powerful generalized queueing system and as
sort of a proof of how general it is they also supply a "batch" system
where the "device" is the shell and the input is shell scripts. I used
MDQS at a previous job (where compute intensive jobs were the norm) to
provide a system whereby users each had their own queue of jobs, so that
everyone had an easy way to ensure that they only had one cpu-bound job
running at a time.
------------------------------
Date: 6 May 88 20:03:15 GMT
From: sunybcs!fredonia!mazumdar at decvax.dec.com
Subject: Need suggestions ... quick
We are currently running 4.3BSD on a VAX-11/750. In an attempt to add a
second cpu we are investigating Sun's. The Sun representative has
suggested the following configuration
Sun 3/140 server
516D 374 Mb disk
60Mb cartidge
16 terminal MUX
+ OS etc.,
Since this would be our first Sun system we would like to hear about the
experiences of other sites running Suns in a multiuser environment before
we make our decision. We are a four year college and our use would be
solely for teaching.
The problem is that our proposal is due in a week. So a fast response
would be appreciated. Please include your telephone number and your
address if your site is geographically close to ours. If you are a
university/college we would really like to hear from you.
Thanks.
Jin Mazumdar (uucp:) ...decvax!sunybcs!fredonia!mazumdar
>>> The following are for historical interest only <<<
Dept. Of Math and C. S.
State University of New York College at Fredonia
Fredonia, N.Y. 14063 (716) 673 3459
[[ I don't know if this will get out in time to help you....but I'll try.
--wnl ]]
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 5 May 88 14:41:26 EDT
From: flanagan at lnssun2.tn.cornell.edu (Douglas Flanagan)
Subject: SunOS 4.0 "features"
Here at Cornell we have a University Software Support Agreement with Sun
which lets us upgrade all of the Sun machines on campus to the latest
version of SunOS. As the contact person at Cornell for this contract, I
receive the new tapes and docs etc. Recently I received two very
interesting letters from Sun.
One was short but it's purpose was to tell me to expect SunOS 4.0 "in the
weeks to come". Because the updates to the manuals are going to be "a
complete set of revised documentation", they will be shipped separately
from the tapes and may not arrive at the same time. So, it does appear
that Sun is gearing up to start shipping 4.0 very soon.
The other letter was titled "When Should I Upgrade to SunOS 4.0?" This one
had a few suprises. It says:
With the release of SunOS 4.0, Sun will update Sun FORTRAN and Sun
Pascal compilers. Sun Fortran 1.1 includes VAX?VMS FORTRAN 4.0 extensions
and Sun Pascal 1.1 includes global optimization and numerous
other feature enhancements. Sun will ship these new compilers as
separate products, rather than with the SunOS operating system.
The original Berkeley derived compilers (f77 and pc) will no longer
be available as part of SunOS.
Well, I can see why they might not want to bother with f77 and pc any
more, especially with all of the changes to the libraries. And maybe these
compilers really are better (that would seem likely). And, under our
software support agreement, they will ship us these compilers for free.
BUT:
1) We will now have to pay an extra $50/month/language/one architecture
plus $25/month/language/additional architecture for software
support for these compilers. Sun does not have any special
University software support agreement for these unbundled
products -yet. That's one reason I am writing this. Support for these
languages will now cost us as much as it does for the rest of SunOS.
2) Anyone who purchases a new machine which is shipped with SunOS 4.0
will now have to pay extra if they want FORTRAN or Pascal. I would
not be complaining if Sun *replaced* f77 and pc with their own
compilers as part of SunOS. But what they are doing is taking them
*out* of SunOS and making you buy them separately.
3) Doesn't this look like a bad trend towards unbundling SunOS?
It would a disaster if SunOS became what the System V releases
for the 3B2 are like. It would become much more difficult to
manage and use such a system. It's one of the things I hate about
DEC and AT&T. I'm afraid the AT&T marketing critters are getting
too much say in how Sun does things.
The other thing that I'm now wondering about is NeWS. I had the
impression, mostly from postings to usenet groups I guess, that SunOS 4.0
would come with NeWS as the windowing system and have Suntools and X11
implemented on top of it. Well, this letter makes no mention of it. All it
says about new window system enhancements is "Industry standard text-menu
terms and menu-selectable edit functions", and "mailtool with multiple
reply/compose windows, incremental reading of new mail, and hierarchical
folders".
So, I guess NeWS will always be a separate product? Will Sun eventually
drop suntools from SunOS and make us all buy NeWS? When will we be able to
get a release of NeWS which includes X11 and suntools?
Of course the above comments are my own opinion and I do not speak for
Cornell, although I know many of our systems people share these concerns.
My only source of information is this letter which I received, plus a few
phone calls to Sun's Rochester, NY office. If I have my facts wrong or
have mis-interpreted the letter, please correct me.
The other items in the "Feature" list for 4.0:
State-of-the-art virtual memory architecture
Shared library facility
File mapping (treating a file as part of virtual memory)
Support for 64 open files per process
Lightweight process library
NETdisk support for diskless clients
Resizable swap area for diskless clients
Automatic mounting of remote file systems
Secure RPC
Secure NFS
System V Release 3.0 Base System interface
Complete System V STREAMS interface
File System Re-organization
suninstall utility
Secure system capabilities (meets "C2" requirements)
On-line disk formatting utility
Optimizing compilers (Application CPU performance is increased
by up to 20% due to global opt. in C comp.)
-Douglas Flanagan
Systems Programmer, Lab. of Nuclear Studies,
Cornell U., Ithaca, NY 14853
flanagan at lnssun2.tn.cornell.edu
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 5 May 88 13:59:41 PDT
From: roode at orc.olivetti.com (David Roode)
Subject: multi-level domain names and more on SunOS 4.0
A fix for sendmail.cf to handle this appared in Sun Spots several months
back. Here is the fix extracted from our sendmail.cf:
##### special local conversions
S6
R$*<@$*$=D>$* $1<@$2LOCAL>$4 convert local domain
R$*<@$*$=D.$=U>$* $1<@$2LOCAL>$5 or full domain name
# test for domain.universe directly
# $=U should work for olivetti.com but doesn't so use $U directly
R$*<@$D.$U>$* $1<@LOCAL>$2 or full domain name
R$*<@$*$=D.$U>$* $1<@$2LOCAL>$4 or full domain name
You add the last two lines following the existing appearance of the first
two. The problem this solves is that a destination host like
pisa.orc.olivetti.com wasn't being recognized as being in the local domain
when the local domain was orc located withing domain olivetti.com .
SOME THINGS COMING IN SUNOS 4.0
At Monday's meeting of the S.F. BAYSLUG, SunOS developers mentioned that
the sendmail coming out with SunOS 4.0 would have an improvement to make
this kludge unnecessary. (Or so I interpreted their statement.) Also, it
will neatly handle delivering all mail from the file server so that all
clients can share a common set of mailboxes and none need run sendmail.
Recipients will see the mail as coming from the file server and will be
able to have replies delivered even if the particular client happens to be
down. Also an Internet name server is going to be supported in SunOS with
somewhat better integration with Yellow Pages. SunOS 4.0 is supposed to
begin the distribution cycle next week, and they have already been running
it on 1000 machines in house. Everyone has been mailed a letter announcing
certain layered products for which support under 4.0 will be delayed.
Virtual memory has been completely re-done in 4.0, with many effects, most
pleasant. There are no more texts, so no more limit on the number that
can be active, i.e. no text table full problem. There's also no more
(nominally 10%) allocation of main memory to file buffers so any memory
not needed for other things is used for file buffering. This general
dynamicism of allocation improves performance of the typical single user
diskless client. Trade-offs were made to use more memory and CPU to
reduce I/O requirements. This means 4mb is an absolute minimum for
reasonable operation of SunOS 4.0, which only affects Sun 2's. Swap space
requirements are reduced. Page at a time sharing and copy-on-write are
features of the new VM. Performace was improved 15% for diskless 3/50's
and 25% for diskless 3/260's. Overall performance was a wash, but nearly
everyone will see some benefits and some disbenefits. Perhaps the area
suffering somewhat is multiuser configurations, but I theorize that
addition of memory will alleviate this considerably.
Shared libraries are a new feature. The disk space needed by the
operating system files in general has been reduced as a result. Client
implementation has been overhauled totally to use NFS instead of ND. To
boot from a non-Sun NFS server, a client needs only TFTPBOOT support, a
new RPC service dealing with configuration information, and standard NFS
even a very old implementation. On Sun's servers, client space now lives
inside a filesystem, hence inside a usable partition. Within that
filesystem, sharing can take place between different clients. Swap space
occurs to regular files, though they generally are pre-allocated.
Allocations can be changed so long as space is available. One person
described nearly running out of swap space, allocating a new swap file,
doing a swap-on, and saving himself. To re-size an active swap file, only
that client need be halted. Several OS filesystems formerly directly
under the root have been moved under /usr to increase sharing by clients.
Lightweight processes are another new feature, as well as automounting of
remote filesystems (and autodismounting) and secure networking
enhancements. There is increased System V support. There is online disk
formatting, compartmentalized documentation sets and more.
It slices, it dices, it chops, it grinds... [[ Hurry, this is a limited
time offer. Not available in any store. Call before midnight tonight....
--wnl ]]
David Roode
Olivetti Research Center
(415) 496-6243
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 6 May 88 10:37:20 pdt
From: pkb at wyse.com (Praveen Bhatia)
Subject: Need help with YP Server setup
I need to set up the following. Can anyone tell me how to do it.
I need to have yp_server1 to provide 'services' for say passwd & group
files, and yp_server2 for the other files (ethers, aliases,....). Thus
when a yp_client needs to lookup the passwd or group data bases, the
request goes to yp_server1 (directly or indirectly) and all other requests
go to yp_server2 (directly or indirectly).
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks.
Praveen
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 5 May 88 17:51:23 ADT
From: David Trueman <dalcs!david at uunet.uu.net>
Subject: 3/60 as a server?
Someone around here without news access is considering using a 3/60 with
one or two 327 MB disks as a server for 4-6 diskless 3/50s. I have my
doubts about the preformance of this configuration (to be used for
software development). Is there anyone using a similar configuration who
could comment on this? Thanks.
UUCP {uunet utai watmath}!dalcs!david
CDN david at cs.dal.cdn
INTERNET david%dalcs at uunet.UU.NET
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 3 May 88 19:51:43 PDT
From: ulysses!csw at ucbvax.berkeley.edu
Subject: ESTALE?
Running SunOS 3.2 on 3/280s and 3/60s
Can someone please explain how and why one can gets the error
ESTALE, "Stale NFS file handle"?
I have an application that consists of two parts. One part runs on a file
server constantly updating files by using rename(2) to move new files into
well known places. Another part of the application runs on nfs clients
looking at these well known files to see if their status has changed. If
the status has changed, it rereads the files. The problem is that
sometimes a stat(2) on the client on the well known file fails with
errno=70. Since I'm using rename() on the server I expected the file to
never be unavailable! Can anyone offer suggestions for how I might avoid
getting the ESTALE error?
Chris Warth
ATT Bell Laboratories
Murray Hill NJ
{ihnp4|ucbvax}!ulysses!csw
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 5 May 88 14:05:29 MDT
From: Michael Wester <wester at aleph0.unm.edu>
Subject: dvitool?
Does anyone have the source for dvitool and/or any better TeX previewer
tools? We do have the source for dvisun (from a TeX distribution tape)
but that isn't as nice as dvitool for which we only have an old (but
working) binary?
Michael Wester --- wester at aleph0.UNM.EDU (Internet), wester at unmb (BITNET)
Department of Mathematics, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico
[[ NOTICE: dvitool and the rest of the VorTeX software is NOT PUBLIC
DOMAIN! It is also NOT REDISTRIBUTABLE! You must sign a license to
legally obtain a copy. We have the sources to dvitool, but we cannot
redistribute them. If you want more information about dvitool and VorTeX
(the project of which dvitool is a part), send e-mail containing your
postal address to "dist-vortex at ucbvax.Berkeley.edu". And, yes, dvitool is
very nice. --wnl ]]
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 2 May 88 11:20:16 EDT
From: formtek!pen at idis.UUCP (Philip E. Nickerson, Jr.)
Subject: TeXsun?
Where can I acquire a copy of TeXsun sources?
-Phil
Philip E. Nickerson,Jr. |UUCP {pitt,psuvax1}!idis!formtek!pen
(412)937-4900|(800)FORMTEK| decvax!formtek!pen
|Snail Formative Technologies, Inc., Foster Plaza VII
| 661 Andersen Dr., Pittsburgh PA 15220
------------------------------
End of SUN-Spots Digest
***********************
More information about the Comp.sys.sun
mailing list