A/UX hits Europe!

[William Roberts]

We have finally received our A/UX system and the 54 Mac IIs to
run it on: this is the first A/UX customer site in Europe
according to our Apple dealer.

What have we got:

* 52 Mac IIs with 5Meg RAM, 4-bit colour, 40Meg hard disk and
  EtherPort II cards.
* Disks currently organised as

        20 Meg MacOS partition
         5 Meg AUX swap
         5 Meg AUX /tmp
        20 Meg AUX root+/usr partitions

This is attached to an Ethernet full of Suns, Whitechapel MG1s
(cheap UK 32016 based UNIX workstations), a Sequent Balance 21000
and a few other bits and pieces, all running NFS. The MG1s run
a perfectly workable UNIX system in 12 Meg root+/usr with 8 Meg
swap, so we don't anticipate any problems there.

We also have an existing Appletalk with a Kinetics FastPath
gateway and the '86 version of the Stanford KIP & CAP software.


What are we going to do with it:

* The Mac IIs are basically staff workstations, one per desk.
* We want X11 and NeWS asap
* We already need serious access to HFS from A/UX.

We have X11 source and NeWS 1.0 source, and we intend to port
both of these anyway: any pointers on the X port would be very
helpful, and we might well be prepared to give it away
afterwards (sorry Apple, but have you seen the "software
exchange rate" in the UK? 1 dollar = 4 pounds sterling! Time
you suffered for a change.)

The NeWS port we can't give away, but we'd make a damn good
beta site for anyone interested.

I am about to employ a summer student to write an "hfs" program
to go with the existing, but useless(?) "mfs" program (Can
anyone say how I make an MFS filesystem on a floppy?): I intend
to make this work as a utility program, then weld it into a
user-level NFS server, so that we can "mount" the HFS partition
as an NFS filestore on our machines without needing to tinker
with the kernel. That too might be given away.


Our background is UNIX and NFS (we have NFS source as well), so
we could use some hints on whether or not to join APDA, should
we pay for AUX updates etc.
-- 

William Roberts         ARPA: liam at cs.qmc.ac.uk  (gw: cs.ucl.edu)
Queen Mary College      UUCP: liam at qmc-cs.UUCP
LONDON, UK              Tel:  01-975 5250