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From: hudson@dalcs.UUCP (Bruce Hudson)
Newsgroups: comp.os.vms
Subject: Problems writing a Symbiont
Message-ID: <2641@dalcs.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 6-Oct-87 17:01:35 EDT
Article-I.D.: dalcs.2641
Posted: Tue Oct  6 17:01:35 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 9-Oct-87 06:41:50 EDT
Organization: Math, Stats & CS, Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, Canada
Lines: 47
Keywords: ZETA, Symbiont


    I am involved in attempting to write a symbiont to support a Zeta-8
plotter under VMS 4.5. I have written the shell of the symbiont but I
am having some difficulties. I would appreciate any help on the problems
described below. On the other hand -- if anyone has a working symbiont
that they would be willing to send to me; you'd make my day. If it
supports the Zeta plotters, so much the better.

    However, I am currently stumped by two problems:

 1) If I link by program with the /DEBUG option, a START/QUEUE will hang
    immediately after starting the symbiont process. I have set up a
    terminal and defined DBG$INPUT and DBG$OUTPUT appropriately. There
    is no message to indicate what is going wrong and the first lines of
    executable code - an open and a print - are not executed.

 2) When I link the symbiont without debug and do a START/QUEUE; a number
    of error messages are printed to the console by the job controller.
    First there are a number of 

		'JBC-E-INVMSG, invalid mailbox message received' 

    followed by

		'JBC-F-REAJBCMBX, error reading job controller mailbox'
    
    and

		'SYSTEM-W-ENDOFFILE, end of file'

    The main problem that I have with this is that this seems to occur within
    the call to SMB$INITIALIZE. I have fallen back on the old fashioned
    debugging methods of writing debug information to a file. The line
    immediately prior to the SMB$INITIALIZE call prints; one immediately
    after does not.


        I thank you in advance for any information/assistance. Please respond
    by mail to HUDSON@DAL.BITNET.

							Bruce Hudson
							Dalhousie University

-- 
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Bruce A. Hudson				{dartvax|utcsrgv|dreacad}!dalcs!hudson
Dalhousie University			Halifax, NS, Canada