Sun-Spots Digest, v6n92
William LeFebvre
Sun-Spots-Request at RICE.EDU
Thu May 19 14:43:05 AEST 1988
SUN-SPOTS DIGEST Wednesday, 18 May 1988 Volume 6 : Issue 92
Today's Topics:
Re: 4.0-notes on archive server
Re: Looking for Sun APL
Re: XY451 firmware
Re: Sun 4/110 memory
Re: gammontool (2)
ho termcap entry & security question
A SunView Interrupt Button (any suggestions)
Sun OS 4.0 opinions wanted
875 Meg Disk yet?
3rd party SCSI disks for 386i ?
Device Drivers on SunOS 4.0?
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----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 16 May 88 10:06:43 EDT
From: wyatt%cfa at harvard.harvard.edu (Bill Wyatt)
Subject: Re: 4.0-notes on archive server
The shar file containing the 4.0-notes.ms file (received from
archive-server at rice.edu) actually had two copies in it, thus doubling the
28k file length. I suspect this is incorrect...
[[ Something must have gone wrong en route to you. The copy in the
archives is 28K long and (as far as I can tell) contains only one copy of
the document. Or perhaps you requested it twice: once in the subject
field and once in the body! The archive server does consider the subject
field to be a candidate for a valid command. --wnl ]]
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 16 May 88 12:46:06 EDT
From: mjab at think.com
Subject: Re: Looking for Sun APL
I don't know about any public domain APL's for the SUN
APL's for the SUN that cost money include (in order of how much I know
about them):
Sharp APL/UX I.P. Sharp Associates
1200 First Federal Plaza,
Rochester NY 14614
Attn: David G. Smith (716) 546-7270
this is a very full-featured APL with Nested Arrays, Event handling,
Shared Variables, and advanced operators based on Iverson's "Dictionary of
APL." The only real drawback is that the interface with the rest of the
UNIX world is non-standard. This product is based on the one below.
STSC APL
Same as the above but without the Dictionary Operators and with a
different event handling system and possibly without shared variables (I'm
not sure). The nested arrays in the STSC product follow IBM's conventions
of "Strand Notation." This would be a good choice if compatibility with
IBM's APL-2 is a factor. Suffers from the same lack of a standard Unix
interface.
STSC Inc.
2115 East Jefferson St.
Rockville, MD 20852
Attn: Stephanie Crognale (301) 984-5444
There are probably other Sun implementations that I don't know about such
as Dyalog APL from England.
If the Public Domain aspect is more important than the Sun aspect, I know
of the following
*Sharp APL/PC for IBM PC and close compatibles. An IBM 370 APL and an
emulator on which to run it. Not speedy, but full featured. Available
from on-line networks and from I.P. Sharp.
*I-APL for Sinclair QL, IBM PC, BBC Micro, and (I think) Apple II. This
is a new implementation meant for use in schools. It is available on
electronic bulletin boards and from:
Edward M. Cherlin
6611 Linville Drive
Weed, CA 96094
(916) 938-4684
*APL-90 For Apple Macintosh
SYNC
12, Place Hotel di Ville
42000 Saint-Etienne
France
Contact J.J. Giradot
011-33-77-32-65-62
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 16 May 88 11:01:22 PDT
From: brian at ucsd.edu (Brian Kantor)
Subject: Re: XY451 firmware
Some have reported problems with more than one Eagle drive giving
intermittant "sequencer error" and other such messages.
We ran into these errors with the XY450 controller. Upon calling Xylogics
and finally finding the person who knew the answers, we found that we
could buy the proper firmware for a moderate price - I think it was $50 or
$100 or something like that.
The explanation I remember was that the total number of bytes per sector
(including sync, preamble, header, data preamble, and postamble) required
by the controller was slightly more than the 600 bytes the Eagle provides.
I think the chips they sent were a new ROM and a new sequencer PAL.
Clearly you should call Xylogics and ASK.
Brian Kantor UC San Diego
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 16 May 88 11:51 CDT
From: David F. Dow <dow at mcc.com>
Subject: Re: Sun 4/110 memory
Postal-Address: 3500 W. Balcones Center Drive, Office #3.11108 Austin, TX 78759
Business-Phone: 338-3777
I'd like to clarify the 4/110 memory issue. Clearpoint does offer this
memory. The following is from one of their information sheets. Other
companies probably do (or will) offer this memory as well.
>Clearpoint seems to be looking at about $500-$600/M purchased in
>quantities of 8M.
The price seems to be fluctuating a lot, but this is about the range I've
seen. Minimum purchase is 16M. You can't use 8M by itself anyway.
>There is some indication that you can mix types so you
>could have 8M of 1M simms and fill your other slots with 256k simms
>for a total of 12M.
There are two banks of 16 SIMMS on the 4/110 CPU board. Each bank must
contain like memory, but the two banks can have different types, or one
bank can be left empty. Thus, here are the possible configurations:
8M = 32 X (1/4)MB SIMMS
16M = 16 X 1MB SIMMS
20M = 16 X (1/4)MB SIMMS + 16 X 1MB SIMMS
32M = 32 X 1MB SIMMS
The board can be jumpered to configure 4MB with 1/4M SIMMS or 8MB with 1M
SIMMS, but Sun says this is for diagnostic purposes only.
Note that whichever upgrade path you choose, you will end up discarding
some of the 1/4MB SIMMS. Perhaps you can order another 4/110 without any
memory (fat chance). I'm hoping that Sun will offer some kind of upgrade
path like they do with 260 memory, although Sun claims they will not.
I am not affiliated in any way with Clearpoint. I asked these questions
when we ordered our 4/110s and they were the only company that could
answer them. Hope this helps.
-- David F. Dow
------------------------------
Date: 16 May 88 13:40:51 GMT
From: Rich Salz <rsalz at bbn.com>
Subject: Re: gammontool (1)
I don't have access to 3.4 or 3.5 sources, but assuming they haven't
changed it from 3.2, the program plays fair. Writing a good cheater is
very hard to do. N.B.: the folks at UCB released their backgammon game
to the Usenet newsgroup comp.sources.games; it's archived on uunet.uu.net,
among other places. (Don't ask me about it.)
/rich $alz
Please send comp.sources.unix-related mail to rsalz at uunet.uu.net.
[[ A very simple way that it *could* cheat (I'm not saying that I think it
actually *does* this) is to only allow you to roll unusable rolls when you
have a man on the bar. It would be a little harder to get the program to
give itself needed rolls, I guess. As for the UCB backgammon, the two
games (gammontool and UCB backgammon) may have had identical origins, but
afterplaying both I can definitely say that they do not use the same
playing strategy! That leads me to believe that they are not the same
game. --wnl ]]
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 16 May 88 10:59:03 CDT
From: wca at emx.utexas.edu (William C. Anderson)
Subject: Re: gammontool (2)
Gammontool players:
Surely not all of the SunSpots gammonfool players have missed the bugs in
gammonfool which allow a decent player to pound him into submission, to
wit:
1) Gammonfool evidently has poor recognition of his opponent's defensive
position (this is probably inherited from the BSD backgammon program,
which was recently "declassified" and posted to the net).
In particular, gammonfool doesn't recognize a "6 prime" defensive
position. In a game where you have a little "shape" and have set up
a 6 prime pinning gammonfool in your home board, and where the 'fool
has a pip count advantage, start doubling! The 'fool will return the
doubles until the game value is 64. Then, roll home your 6 prime
and take the 64 games (or 128, if you get some rolls) to the bank.
2) Gammonfool accepts stupid doubles in the endgame (just like BSD
backgammon). For example, assume that you have the cube (or that
it hasn't been offered) and that both you and the 'fool have men
on your respective 1 and 2 spikes, AND that the roll is yours. You
are sure to win. Double the 'fool and he accepts, since his only
criterion for accept/reject is evidently pip count, and pip count
is even! This "feature" alone should allow you to stay ahead of
the 'fool in games.
Of course, these bugs take a lot of the fun out of gammonfool. I am a
decent player (OK, so I've read Magriel once, but it was a long time ago)
but am by no means a great player. I haven't played the 'fool in quite
some time (the thrill is gone), but my score file says that the game count
is Myself: 887 and the 'Fool: 457. Oh, that I could do so well in Vegas!
Somehow, I doubt that these bugs have a high enough priority to be "fixed
in 4.0".
William Anderson - University of Texas Computation Center - wca at emx.utexas.edu
[[ Under what version of the operating system did you last play
gammon[ft]ool? --wnl ]]
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 16 May 88 09:57:30 edt
From: mlijews at nswc-wo.arpa
Subject: ho termcap entry & security question
Digging around in the man pages for kbd, I found that the Sun monitors do
have a home sequence. The proper entry to add to /etc/termcap is:
ho=\ESC[H
Just thought someone might be interested.
I also have a question about how people give access to their Sun's, which
are normally kept locked via lockscreen, to visitors without giving away
passwords. We recently had an episode here where a visitor, when he
couldn't get onto the Sun due to the screen being locked and the owner
being away for the day, did an L1-A on it! It just so happened that the
owner had a multi-day calculation running at the time, which was promptly
lost.
The question: how do people let other people use their Sun, without giving
up their password and still maintain a reasonable level of security?
Mike Lijewski (mlijews at nswc-wo.arpa)
Applied Math Branch
NSWC
Silver Spring, MD 20903
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 16 May 88 10:47:39 EDT
From: csrobe at icase.arpa (Charles S. Roberson)
Subject: A SunView Interrupt Button (any suggestions)
I have a SunView application that is performing a simulation which does
some integration and (hopefully) eventually converges and stops. As the
simulation is running it displays some graphical information about the
progress of the integration. The actually performance of the simulation
depends on many parameters and the input data -- as a result, sometimes we
want to interrupt the routine doing the integration (e.g. we see that it
is not going to converge or we realize that we munged a parameter) w/o
aborting the SunView process.
My question is this, is there some way that I can define an INTERRUPT
button that when depressed takes control from the rogue routine and
returns it to the window_manager? Any and all help will be greatly
appreciated!
Thanks,
-chip
Chip Roberson ARPANET: csrobe at icase.arpa
1105 London Company Way BITNET: $csrobe at wmmvs.bitnet
Williamsburg, VA 23185 UUCP: ...!uunet!pyrdc!gmu90x!wmcs!csrobe
------------------------------
Date: 16 May 88 16:20:56 GMT
From: woods at handies.ucar.edu (Greg Woods)
Subject: Sun OS 4.0 opinions wanted
We have to perform an upgrade to at least 3.5 on one of our local Sun
systems (there is something in there that the graphics project needs that
is not in earlier versions). Since we also do a lot of communicating on
the Internet, we would really like to go to a resolver-based kernel (that
causes ALL gethostby*() calls to query the name server instead of
/etc/hosts). The only system Sun has that does this is 4.0. My boss claims
to have a source inside Sun that says that 4.0 is unstable under high
loads (a frequent condition around here). So, I am looking for people that
have actual experience with 4.0. How does it perform under high loads? Is
it full of bugs or relatively bug-free? (I understand it is an almost
complete kernel rewrite rather than a simple upgrade).
If you answer this, send it to both sun-spots at rice.edu (no doubt many
readers of this group are also interested), and also please to me
personally (woods at ncar.ucar.edu), as we need feedback quickly as a
decision on which way to go here must be made in the next few weeks, and
I'd really like to avoid either an unnecessary extra system upgrade or
installing an unstable system (which we can't afford on the production
machine in question). Thanks for your input.
--Greg
[[ Two things I'd like to point out. One: to my knowledge 4.0 is still in
beta test. It is due out real soon now, but beta test sites are under an
agreement to not say anything to the general public about their
experiences. What I'm saying is that I doubt anyone can answer your
question just yet. ---BULLETIN: after typing that last comment, I
received notification from one of our readers that he has received a real
copy of version 4.0. His message will appear in the next issue.---
Two: (and maybe you know this) the kernel itself has no say in how host
names get translated into addresses. That's all done in the libraries.
The name resolver package comes with a library that includes its own
gethostby* calls. Unfortunately, it requires that you include a different
netdb.h file. If you can get source for all your favorite network
programs then you can recompile and link with the resolver library and it
will use the resolver. Also, I believe that there is a way to get the
yp-server equivalent of /etc/hosts to check the name resolver if it can't
find the host in its database. As you say, this will all be much better
in 4.0 --wnl ]]
------------------------------
Date: 16 May 88 17:14:23 GMT
From: km at emory.UUCP (Ken Mandelberg)
Subject: 875 Meg Disk yet?
Has Sun started delivering systems with the new 875 Meg disk option yet?
It was announced several months ago, but what I hear from our local people
it is still in Beta test.
The information I have is that Sun is in principle using both NEC 2363s
and Hitachi DK815-10. The NEC is larger and is more available locally, and
I am considering adding one obtaind from a third party. In the past Sun
has been willing to maintain customer supplied drives as long as they
coincide with drives they already maintain and satisfy certain conditions
(correct revision, Sun cables, etc). In this case I am being told they
won't take the NEC drive under contract. Has anypne else tried?
Is anyone running the NEC drive on Sun yet?
Ken Mandelberg | {decvax,sun!sunatl,gatech}!emory!km UUCP
Emory University | km at emory BITNET
Dept of Math and CS | km at emory.ARPA ARPA,CSNET
Atlanta, GA 30322 | Phone: (404) 727-7963
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 16 May 88 13:26:21 MDT
From: lyndon at ncc.nexus.ca (Lyndon Nerenberg)
Subject: 3rd party SCSI disks for 386i ?
We have a 386i/250 on order and are wondering what to do about disks for
this machine. Sun's prices for the large disk option seem a bit high. We
currently run a pair of CDC Wren IV's on our 3/280S, and are very
impressed with the performance. Does anyone know of any changes to the
SCSI interface on the 386i that would prevent us from moving one of the
Wrens over? (The 386i will have a Sun supported 90MB drive so installation
won't be a problem. We would like to use the Wren for the user file
system)
Lyndon Nerenberg
Nexus Computing Inc.
{alberta,uunet}!ncc!lyndon || lyndon at ncc.Nexus.CA
------------------------------
Date: 16 May 88 20:28:43 GMT
From: woods at handies.ucar.edu (Greg Woods)
Subject: Device Drivers on SunOS 4.0?
We have several local device drivers (for things like the CRAY UNIX
Station and a hyperchannel network), some of which have even been locally
written or locally hacked. Has anyone gotten any non-Sun-supported device
drivers that they had been using under SunOS 3.* to work on 4.0? How hard
was it to do? What kinds of changes did you have to make?
--Greg (woods at ncar.ucar.edu)
------------------------------
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