Sun-Spots Digest, v6n268
William LeFebvre
Sun-Spots-Request at Rice.edu
Sun Oct 23 00:14:42 AEST 1988
SUN-SPOTS DIGEST Friday, 21 October 1988 Volume 6 : Issue 268
Today's Topics:
Re: NFS mount mail
RE: C/A/T troff to ditroff
Re: Large screen display for SUN video output
Summary: 3rd Party Sun 3/60 Memory
Bug in Contool 2.0 (with patch)
wierd NFS hangup
Portmap, Gateway problems
learn for Sun 3/260?
color hardcopy of Sun screen - how?
news reader for sunview, news or x?
Experience with "NSE"?
PostScript printers for Suns?
locking down systems?
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----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 17 Oct 88 14:31:19 EDT
From: beck at svax.cs.cornell.edu (Micah Beck)
Subject: Re: NFS mount mail
In Sun-Spots v6n258, two notes (from white at cs.unc.edu and Wayne Folta)
offered solutions to the problem of reading mail from a Sun client. Both
solutions involved directing all mail to one server which delivers it to
an exported directory. Clients then mount that directory and read mail
from it.
I am nervous about doing this because I know that the semantics of
concurrent access to NFS files is different from that of uniprocessor
Unix. I also know that mail programs tend to rely heavily on the
semantics of concurrent access. Of particular concern are non-atomic
actions like deleting a file and rewriting it.
Can anyone out there provide an authoritative answer: is it safe to read
mail using NFS in this fashion? Is there a potential problem when mail is
read while new mail is delivered? In the meantime, I read my mail on an
overloaded central Vax, while sitting at a Sun-3/60!
Micah Beck beck at cs.cornell.edu
Dept of Computer Science
Cornell University
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 17 Oct 88 12:06:36 -0700
From: greg at aerospace.aero.org
Subject: RE: C/A/T troff to ditroff
>Is it possible to get ditroff output on a Sun with SunOS 4.0? If not (and
>I think not) is there a free C/A/T troff-2-ditroff out there? All replies
>welcome....
>[[ Am I missing something here?... --wnl ]]
Perhaps I didn't state my question clearly enough. SunOS provides a nice
text formatting program "troff". However, as far as I know, it is totally
useless to most people because its output in NOT device independent. It is
specifically designed to be used with a Computer Aided Typesetter or
C/A/T.
There is a rich assortment of software out there which uses ditroff style
output (ascii), but it is useless with the output from SunOS "troff". My
question, then, is "Is there a "ditroff" program provided with SunOS or a
way to make troff output ditroff style (ascii) commands?"
Once again, If there is no free way to directly get ditroff type output
commands, is there a free program to convert the device dependent "troff"
output to ditroff style output?
As a final note, sense I have not gotten any positive responses about the
free filter mentioned above, I have started writing one (it doesn't appear
to be as hard as I first thought) and it should be available soon.
[[ AAhhhh. I see. You cat get the "device independent troff" package
straight from AT&T Bell Labs. I don't know how much it costs, tho. It is
probably worth it, tho, because "ditroff" is much better than "troff".
--wnl ]]
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 17 Oct 88 13:41:56 EDT
From: dpk at morgan.com (Douglas P. Kingston)
Subject: Re: Large screen display for SUN video output
The Barcographics 400 will handle Sun Color systems and many other things.
It is a high-end projection television system. It was the best of the
units that we evaluated.
-Doug-
PS. See some of the Sun-Spots articles about 6 months ago for more info.
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 17 Oct 88 13:54 EDT
From: "Eugene C. Libardi" <AIDEL at UMAECS.BITNET>
Subject: Summary: 3rd Party Sun 3/60 Memory
Sorry this took so long, but things got crazy around here and I just
wasn't able to get to it.
I didn't get as many replies as I thought I would. Of the 5 I got, none
were bad comments on any of the 3 vendors mentioned. These vendors are
Parity, Clearpoint, and Helios. Two were good recommendations for Parity,
two were good recommendations for Helios, and one was a good
recommendation for Clearpoint. Add my good comments on Clearpoint and it's
a three way tie.
The pricing and service seem to be pretty much equal, too.
Price/Meg (US$): List Univ. Disc.
---------------- ---- ----------
Parity (actually Stout Assoc, 489 405
Parity's rep in my
area)
Helios 490 410
Clearpoint 495 410
All three have a lifetime warranty, 24 hour repair/replace policy
(although Parity says only if it's critical), and deliver in a week.
Clearpoint has a 24 hour, 7 days-a-week 800 support line. Parity was iffy
on support, and Helios I don't know about.
Both Clearpoint and Parity were willing to wheel and deal, but not Helios.
Some interesting info:
Helios is the oldest 3rd party Sun supplier. They supply 3rd party
products for Sun's whole product line.
Clearpoint is the biggest, selling memory for many hardware platforms
(DEC, Appollo, Sun, ...), and have a large sales/support force.
I've dealt with Clearpoint before. My salesperson (Rebecca Haberman) is
very good and very helpful. Clearpoint has kept all their promises and has
been there with the support and come through on the repair/replace policy.
They also publish the remarkably objective and well-written "Designer's
Guide to Add-In Memory", packed with a lot of good info. Though they are
marginally more expensive, we decided to go with them because of the
benefits a large company offers, the experience of their sales staff, and
the desire to keep the number of vendors we deal with down to a minimum.
How to contact them all:
Clearpoint Inc.
99 South Street
Hopkinton, MA 01748
(617) 435-5395
Parity Systems, Inc.
20 S. Santa Cruz Ave. #102
Los Gatos, CA 95030
(408) 354-1500
Helios
(408) 432-0292
I don't have Helios's address, but here is a local vendor:
RML Associates (303)799-6525
Larry McNiff
Helios c/o RML Associates
6535 S. Dayton Suite 1950
Englewood, Co 80111
I hope someone is able to use this information and that it is accurate.
These prices are as of 10/17/88. The way chips have been going lately, I'm
sure these will get lower before they get higher.
Gene Libardi
Mechanical Design Automation Lab Internet: aidel at ecs.umass.edu
Dept. of Mechanical Engineering Bitnet: aidel at umaecs
University of Massachusetts/Amherst Tel.: (413) 545-3599
Amherst MA 01003
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 17 Oct 88 14:19:36 EDT
From: Chuck Musciano <chuck at trantor.harris-atd.com>
Subject: Bug in Contool 2.0 (with patch)
A bug in contool 2.0 caused contool to hang when presented with a filter
with a bad regular expression in it. The following patch fixes the bug.
Thanks to Doug Curtis of GE who led me to this bug.
Chuck Musciano
Advanced Technology Department
Harris Corporation
(407) 727-6131
ARPA: chuck at trantor.harris-atd.com
[[ The patch has been placed in the archives under "sun-source" as
"contool.patch.shar". It is 5355 bytes long. It 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: Mon, 17 Oct 88 14:31:33 EST
From: mckay at courageous.ecn.purdue.edu (Dwight D. McKay)
Subject: wierd NFS hangup
I've noticed on several occasions the following NFS hangup:
Client sends NFS_WRITE of slightly less then 8K or 4K. Write is send as a
fragmented UDP packet. Nothing come back from the server. The write is
retried. Nothing comes back. Eventually client (and later server)
crashes running out of MBUFS.
Equipment involved:
Server (gus) 4/280, 2 Hitachi DK815-10's, second ethernet board,
32 Meg. memory
Clients seen to exhibit this behavior so far:
(gus7) 4/110, color, FPU, 8Meg.
(gus13) 3/60, color, FPU, 4Meg.
All running SunOS 4.0, kernels built from source tape
I've observed this behavior using etherfind running on another Sun on the
same ethernet as gus and her clients. I've also looked at the MBUFs on
gus using netstat -m.
The 4/110 seems to have run out of swap space or crashed and be in the
process of rebooting when this condition is noted. I do not have a crash
"partition" setup for it or any other clients. I've only had this group
of Suns up for two weeks and it's happened twice that I've been here to
observe. Once after a 4/110 crash and once after the 4/110 has run out of
swap space.
Has anyone seen this before? Is there a workaround or better still a fix?
--Dwight D. Mckay, ECN Workstation Software Support
--Purdue University, Engineering Computer Network
--Office: MSEE 104f, Phone: (317) 494-3561
--ARPAnet: mckay at harbor.ecn.purdue.edu, Usenet: ...rutgers!pur-ee!mckay
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 17 Oct 88 14:15:44 PDT
From: jimc at math.ucla.edu
Subject: Portmap, Gateway problems
We have two bizarre problems that we cannot figure out. All occur on Sun
3/180 and 3/280 machines running SunOS v3.5. Does anyone recognize these,
and does anyone have a solution or even an explanation?
1. Route-add hangs. We do not run routed. The network looks like this:
128.97.64.x ------ 128.97.64.16 (4.3BSD VAX gateway)
(SunOS 3.5) 128.97.12.8 ------- 128.97.12.1 (PC-RT gateway)
(Also 4.3 VAX) 128.97.28.1 ----- 128.97.28.x
The VAX gateway is up and the PC-RT is down. When booting, the Suns (also the
VAXen) do the command
/usr/etc/route add uclanet-cs 128.97.64.16 2
where YP's networks.byname says
uclanet-cs 128.97.28
All machines hang in this situation. They will hang for half an hour if
the RT doesn't revive (which is all too frequent). But when the RT comes
up, route-add completes and rebooting continues. I believe the same thing
happens when a gateway on our net dies (like 128.97.64.16).
We can't see anything in the source where /usr/etc/route, or the kernel
end of the route-add ioctl, sends anything to the gateway or expects any
reply. It mystifies us how the machine doing route-add can know the
address of either the RT gateway or any machine on the 28-net, so that it
would even be capable of sending such a request or recognizing such a
reply. Yet our machines (SunOS v3.5 and 4.3BSD VAXen) hang. Help!
2. Portmapper croaks. On one day last week, portmap started crashing
repeatedly. It would just silently go away, sometimes leaving a core
file. We were unable to use dbx because /etc/portmap is stripped, and we
could not generate from source an executable version sufficiently
identical to the distributed one. It died of a segmentation violation;
the routine that it died in is in the RPC library; its name is
svc_sendreply() and the relevant code is:
bool_t svc_sendreply(xprt, xdr_results, xdr_location)
register SVCXPRT *xprt; xdrproc_t xdr_results; caddr_t xdr_location; {
struct rpc_msg rply;
rply.rm_direction = REPLY;
rply.rm_reply.rp_stat = MSG_ACCEPTED;
rply.acpted_rply.ar_verf = xprt->xp_verf; /* DIED HERE */
rply.acpted_rply.{various stuff} = various stuff;
return (SVC_REPLY(xprt, &rply)); }
The pointer xprt was bogus; interpreted as characters it was 'a.ma',
reminiscent of that site's hostname of SONIa.maTH.UCLA.EDU (lower case
used for suspicious fragment). It's not clear who called the routine;
there are five or six possibilities.
Portmapper crashed many times that afternoon. The problem went away after
a reboot. There was possibly one instance the next day. There was one
definite instance the next week, and one (cross fingers) instance this
week. Has anyone seen anything like this?
Thanks to Vahe Sarkissian of Mathnet for figuring out what little we know
about portmapper and for going over the sources on the route problem.
James F. Carter (213) 825-2897
UCLA-Mathnet; 6608B MSA; 405 Hilgard Ave.; Los Angeles, CA 90024-1555
UUCP:...!{rutgers,ucbvax,sdcrdcf,{hao!cepu}}!ucla-cs!math.ucla.edu!jimc
ARPA: jimc at math.ucla.edu BITNET: jimc%math.ucla.edu at INTERBIT
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 17 Oct 88 13:03:45 CDT
From: david at wubios.wustl.edu (David J. Camp)
Subject: learn for Sun 3/260?
I am looking for the learn program that we used to have on a uVax for a
Sun 3/260 running SunOS 4.0 . I checked the comp.sources.unix index to no
avail. I would also be interested in other unix tutorial software. Can
anyone give me a lead?
-David-
(314) 362-3635 Mr. David J. Camp
Room 1108D ^ Box 8067, Biostatistics
706 South Euclid < * > Washington University Medical School
v 660 South Euclid
Bitnet: david at wubios.wustl Saint Louis, MO 63110
Internet: david%wubios at wucs1.wustl.edu uucp: uunet!wucs1!wubios!david
------------------------------
Date: 17 Oct 88 19:19:03 GMT
From: mkhaw at teknowledge-vaxc.arpa (Mike Khaw)
Subject: color hardcopy of Sun screen - how?
We have a need to produce some prints of a color Sun screen. Does anyone
in the Bay Area rent either color printers or photographic apparatus
designed to take screen shots?
Thanks,
Mike Khaw
--
internet: mkhaw at teknowledge.arpa
uucp: {uunet|sun|ucbvax|decwrl|uw-beaver}!mkhaw%teknowledge.arpa
hardcopy: Teknowledge Inc, 1850 Embarcadero Rd, POB 10119, Palo Alto, CA 94303
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 17 Oct 88 14:08:25 CDT
From: Max Ziff <max at gide.uchicago.edu>
Subject: news reader for sunview, news or x?
I sure hope this is a naive question. Does anyone have a good
window-oriented news reader? I am using lwall's rn (with nntp hacks), and
I'm sick of it. I run sunview, but I have friends here who run news (and
are considering switching to x) and I'd be interested to hear of options
for those environments.
Donald Ziff (Max)
ARTFL Project
University of Chicago
(312) 702-0343
max at gide.uchicago.edu
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 17 Oct 88 10:48:45 MDT
From: pvi!rickg at boulder.colorado.edu (Rick Gillespie)
Subject: Experience with "NSE"?
We are about to begin a large project porting an application to the Suns.
My question is "does anyone have experience with NSE"? We are debating
whether to use SCCS or RSC for source code control and we believe a
consideration may be that SCCS will be "easier" to move under NSE. Does
anyone have an (informed :-)) opinion?
Rick Gillespie
UUCP: (boulder,ncar)!pvi!rickg
Internet: rickg%pvi at boulder.colorado.edu
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 17 Oct 88 11:38:39 edt
From: daniel at dg-rtp.dg.com (Stephen Daniel)
Subject: PostScript printers for Suns?
I am interested in a laser-printer that meets the following requirements:
1) Postscript capable
2) Works with Sun's transcript postscript software
3) Has an RS232 or ethernet connection
4) Is fast and holds lots of paper
5) Costs less than $15,000. Less than $10,000 would
be even better.
I'm fairly ignorant of current laser printers. What should I buy? I'll
summarize any suggestions I receive.
Steve Daniel Data General Corp.
daniel at dg-rtp.dg.com Research Triangle Park (Home of DG/UX), NC.
mcnc!rti!dg-rtp!daniel 919 549 8421
[[ I saw a recent chart that claimed to list all PostScript laser
printers. Not one of them claimed to have an Ethernet connection with
IP/TCP support (the DEC printer does DECNet only), even as an option. The
closest you can get if you really want it on an Ethernet is an Imagen with
"UltraScript" support. Almost all PostScript laser printers have RS232
connections: the most popular one is the LaserWriter. What's "fast"? If
you want anything above 8 ppm, you will probably have to pay well over
$15000. --wnl ]]
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 17 Oct 1988 10:15:00.65 CDT
From: <byers at UKANVAX.BITNET> (Ralph Byers)
Subject: locking down systems?
We have a number of sun workstations in faculty offices. Although they
are kept locked, they are not very secure. How would one go about
chaining a workstation down? Are there products on the market? R.B.
[[ Someone just asked this question, but I have not seen any responses yet.
--wnl ]]
------------------------------
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