SUMMARY: HELP! uucico hangs. (International users should read this)

Snorri Bergmann snorri at strengur.is
Tue Jan 16 21:39:19 AEST 1990


First of all I would like to thank everyone who responded to my message,
via e-mail or directly to the net. They where:

paul at actrix.co.nz (Paul Gillingwater)
garyb at philabs.Philips.Com (Gary Blumenstein)
John Mackey <john7 at garfield.cs.mun.ca>
bear at unilog.se (Bjorn Sjoholm)
Dr. T. Andrews <cdis-1!tanner at relay.EU.net>
Jim Gottlieb <jimmy at denwa.info.com>
nuchat!steve at relay.EU.net (Steve Nuchia)
tron1 at tronsbox.UUCP (HIM)
Carl "Art" McIntosh  <bt455s10 at uhccux.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu>
zok!mark at relay.EU.net (Mark W. Snitily)
wilbur!jon at relay.EU.net (Jonathan C. Broome)
marc at CLIK.QC.CA (Marc Boucher)
tneff at bfmny0.UU.NET (Tom Neff)

Thank you all very much!

After trying some of the suggstions I received (nothing worked though) I
grouped up with a local Unix guru and we tried to solve the problem knowing
it was *obvious* that this uucico-hang symptom was not a ISC bug, because
he installed it on another system and there everything worked fine. 

We found out that if someone logged in on the nuucp account (on my system)
and ran uucico directly then I could uucp to other sites after that. So the
problem only came up when somebody logged on and used shell. Then it
suddenly came to us: 

To use the Icelandic character set every logon script runs ttymap(1). This
is done to allow display and input of special characters local to our lang-
uage, and I guess international users use this generally for this purpose.
Now it seems that after the logon script issues ttymap /usr/lib/keyboard/file
the ttymap has effect on all the devices associated with the port you log on,
in this case /dev/tty00 /dev/ttyd0 and /dev/acu0. This mapping is in effect
until you reboot the system or issue ttymap -d on that port. So it is not
strange after all that uucico hangs when the packages it sends are mapped
into something else, checksums are never right, etc. As you can recall I
could cu whenever I wanted, and that worked although uucico did not. That's
because cu uses only 7-bits (btw does anyone know of 8-bit transparent cu?)
and ttymap has no effect on that because our map-file only maps 8-bit char-
acters.

THE SOLUTION: Never use ttymap on a dial-in port if you intend to use it
	      for uucp too!!   

Thank you all,
-- 

Snorri Bergmann, Strengur Consulting Engineers, Reykjavik Iceland
INTERNET: snorri at strengur.is



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