Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.csd.uwm.edu!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!ginosko!uunet!mcsun!hp4nl!dutrun!vlruo02
From: vlruo02@dutrun.UUCP (Ge van Geldorp)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.rt
Subject: Re: rlogin to an RT prevents using vi
Summary: AIX rlogind is broken
Keywords: TCP, vi, rlogin
Message-ID: <867@dutrun.UUCP>
Date: 29 Aug 89 18:31:33 GMT
References: <396@ifcom.UUCP> <1934@ibmpa.UUCP>
Reply-To: ge@dutlru2.tudelft.nl (G.v.Geldorp)
Organization: Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
Lines: 42

In article <1934@ibmpa.UUCP> brunner@ibmsupt.UUCP () writes:
>So, why hasn't WCOLS been set? Both rlogin and telnet make an effort to
>determin the TERM shell variable in the local environment and pass it to
>the remote host, where it may be reset during the remote host login. Check
>your .cshrc/.login on the remote host for settings, you may want to have
>your term variable host dependent, set in a switch statement in .login

[deleted stuff]

>P.S. Your mailage may vary with AIX, check ttys(5) for supported types
>and echo $term (or $TERM) on both ends of the pipe.

You seem to be talking about AOS, I can't comment on that since our
machines runs AIX. However, I think the original poster was also running
AIX, because the problem he describes sounds very familiar to me.
As far as I can tell, the problem has nothing to do with the setting of
the $TERM variable. It has to do with a bug in rlogind. If you use
rlogin to login to an AIX machine, the window size (number of rows/cols)
is not always transferred correctly to the AIX machine. You can confirm
this by issuing the termdef -l and/or termdef -c commands. If the window
size was not transferred correctly, both commands will return 0 (yes,
that's zero, not an empty string). I suppose vi calls the termdef(3)
(or the setupterm(3) routine, which in turn calls termdef(3)) routine
on startup and gets this garbage back, after which it gives up.
One of the systems from which I use rlogin to go to an AIX machine runs
UTek, the Tektronix version of **ix. Recently, we upgraded the UTek
version and we got a new version of rlogin. This version has a new flag,
-w. The documentation says this flag is used to force correct transfer
of the window size to some versions of rlogind based on the BSD 4.3
rlogind. The BSD 4.3 rlogind appearantly does not handle the necessary
out-of-band data transfer needed for the window size exchange correctly.
When I use this -w flag, vi on the RT works correctly...
(BTW, if the problem was really with the $TERM variable, vi wouldn't
complain "Don't know enough about your terminal to use visual" but would
say "xxxx: Unknown terminal type". Try it.)
I reported my problems with rlogin/vi several months ago to IBM but haven't
received a fix yet. Now, would somebody at IBM please take a good look
at it please please please?


Ge van Geldorp.
(ge@dutlru2.tudelft.nl)