Silly questions

[Rich Rosen]

Having just gotten back on the air (sort of) with my UNIX-PC, let me
first thank all the people who responded to my questions back towards
the beginning of this year, when I had a friend post some questions for
me.  (Of course, I forgot to thankthose who sent answers, so apologies
and thanks, belatedly.)  Next, now that I've finally got some things
that I both want to and *can* do with this box, I have a few questions.

1. When I'm using vi's map function, either in my .exrc or interactively
from within vi, I find that mapped keys that are control characters do not
operate at all.  On my old base machine at work I had set up some mapped
macros for doing a lot of silly things, many of which were assigned to ^R
or ^O or ^Z^Z, for example.  NONE of them currently work.  I checked to 
make sure they are defined correctly and they are, apparently.  (In other
words, I didn't do an ASCII file transfer from my old machine that literally
wrote carot-R instead of a cntl-R, there's really a cntl-R there.)  Is this
a known bug or am I doing something wrong somewhere?

2. Recently I started playing with /etc/rc to shorten the bringup time of the
box.  I didn't want to comment out the fsck entirely, I just wanted it to be
skipped over if the machine had previously shut down cleanly.  I saw a trick
that I think accomplishes this in a SUN /etc/rc.  It looks for a file called
/fastboot, and if it's there, /etc/rc skips over the fsck, and then rm -f's
/fastboot.  The shutdown procedures (/etc/shutdown and an /etc/qshut shell
I hacked up) re-create the file /fastboot for next time.  If perchance the
machine craps out, /fastboot is not recreated, and the full fsck of /etc/rc
takes place.  My question:  is this a reasonable and safe practice on my
part?  Is there a better way, and are there other ways to quicken the startup
process that are safe and reasonable?

3. Not having a lot of practical hands-on experience OPERATING a UNIX box,
I needed a lot of help in understanding what UUCP does before I was willing
to start even attempting to play with it.  I got that help from the Nutshell
handbook "Managing UUCP and Usenet".  From that book I also learned of
seemingly obvious (to most) things, like how getty works.  The book describes
the methods used for SysV type systems without uugetty to manage the use of
one port for incoming and outgoing, most of which sound like kludges.  Could
someone explain what exactly the UNIX-PC does to accomplish this?  (I told
you they were silly questions! :-)

4. I need (once again, since I lost the info) the info on how to contact "THE
STORE", and also how to get a hold of HDB/BNU UUCP.

5. Finally, since I'm not UUCP connected to anybody yet, I need some means
of uploading and downloading files.  This machine I'm logged into now does not
have UMODEM, seemingly the only supported way of getting/transmitting files
from/to my machine.  Until I get better services, I need at least a PD
version of UMODEM for this Sun box, in order to first GET that other better
software down to my machine.  Anyone know where I can get such a thing, or
does anyone have a simpler way?

6. This time REALLY finally:  I've read about this new 3.51d release.  I still
have the base 3.5 installed.  Woulod I be able to upgrade to 3.51d
directly?

Thanks in advance to any and all who respond.
--
"Time to eat all your words, swallow your pride, open your eyes..."
		Rich Rosen	rlr at toccata.rutgers.edu
--