Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!RICE.EDU!Sun-Spots-Request From: Sun-Spots-Request@RICE.EDU (William LeFebvre) Newsgroups: comp.sys.sun Subject: Sun-Spots Digest, v6n29 Message-ID: <1988.03.15.23.06.30.058.10037@rice.edu> Date: 16 Mar 88 05:06:29 GMT Sender: uucp@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Reply-To: Sun-Spots@rice.edu Organization: The Internet Lines: 524 Approved: sun-spots@rice.edu SUN-SPOTS DIGEST Tuesday, 15 March 1988 Volume 6 : Issue 29 Today's Topics: Administrivia Re: Disk Setup on Server Re: Where to put swap partition for clients running CLisp Re: vt100 emulator Re: Problem uudecoding 'calc' Sun 386 WORM, Tape archiving info sought reading mouse clicks from shell? VT640 tool? Anyone have the 900 Mbyte Disk Drive? Changing a scsi shoebox from 0 to 1? More than one dump on a 1/4 inch cartridge tape? Using RAM as disk? sendmail.cf--name server interaction problem & suggested fix (long) Send contributions to: sun-spots@rice.edu Send subscription add/delete requests to: sun-spots-request@rice.edu Bitnet readers can subscribe directly with the CMS command: TELL LISTSERV AT RICE SUBSCRIBE SUNSPOTS My Full Name Recent backissues are stored on "titan.rice.edu". For volume X, issue Y, "get sun-spots/vXnY". They are also accessible through the archive server: mail the word "help" to "archive-server@rice.edu". ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 15 Mar 88 14:54:07 CST From: William LeFebvre Subject: Administrivia How many times has someone said "it's so hard to find a specific message in the archived digest issues"? Well, I have a solution. I finally took the time to create automatically generated "master indexes". There are now two additional files in the archives that contain Subject line and volume/issue number for every article: one for volume 5 and one for volume 6 (the latter will get updated periodically). They are sorted by the contents of the Subject field. This is not a sophisticated keyword-retrieval system by any means. I made no attempt to generalize the content of each article into a few keywords. But it does provide you with the data to do your own keyword searching (by just searching through the file if nothing else). The files are stored in the "sun-spots" section of the archives under the names "v5.index" and "v6.index". They are currently 47499 and 18731 bytes respectively (the latter amount will increase with time). I hope that this helps alleviate the problem of finding information in the back issues. Also, Volume 5 issue 10 is now a proper-looking digest. Originally it was missing the digest information at the front, but I had to add that back to get the automatic index generator to work correctly. Finally, I have taken the liberty to add an extra field to the header of each message in the digest: the "Reference" field. For a message that is in response to another, this field will contain the volume and issue number of the digest in which the original message appeared. William LeFebvre Department of Computer Science Rice University ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 1 Mar 88 00:40:12 EST From: mcgrew@topaz.rutgers.edu (Charles) Subject: Re: Disk Setup on Server Reference: v6n21 I'd suggest something like this: swap space for your 3/60's - 25-30, unless you plan to use one as a 'lisp-engine' or something. root partitions for client - the 7 meg default is ok - we get away with less than 2 by simlinking most of /etc on the client to /pub/etc (a copy of the client's /etc on the server), and mounting /usr/client/tmp/hostname as /tmp for space and nsf-speed reasons. root partitions for server - the 7 meg default is usually ok (especially since /bin and /lib point of to /pub; but with all that disk space, why not make it 10? swap space for the server - the 17 meg default for the server is ok (but with all that space, 25-30 is cheap), unless you want to put real users on it (which is probably a bad idea), in which case up to 75 Meg. is desirable. Hope this helps, Charles ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 1 Mar 88 00:47:15 EST From: mcgrew@topaz.rutgers.edu (Charles) Subject: Re: Where to put swap partition for clients running CLisp Reference: v6n21 If all you've got is 4 suns on this network, I wouldn't worry about overrunning the net with swapping. Its my opinion that its not very different to have a scsi disk vs. the net - scsi disks are SLOW. I'd suggest you just use the net, and spend the money on extra memory. Charles ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 29 Feb 88 15:50:50 EST From: Edward L. Lafferty Subject: Re: vt100 emulator [ Note for version 3.4: There has been a rearrangement of files within the library libsuntool.a in version 3.4 which prevents the makefile in libdir from working correctly. Until I can get the sources to fix this you will have to find a library from 3.2 to compile with. If you can't get one, I have put one in the ftp/pub/version3.2 directory below under the name nlibsuntool.a. (It is large, so don't ftp it if you don't have to.) ] There is now a source port of vt100tool to sun-3 running version 3.2(3.0). It can be accessed via anonymous FTP via arpanet as follows: 1. FTP to mitre-b-ed (192.12.120.58) 2. login as anonymous (password: anonymous) 3. get pub/version3.2/* 4. Make sure that your fonts are in /usr/local/lib/fonts/vtfonts since this has been compiled into this version. 5. Make sure that you set the "binary" option in FTP for the .o files. You will need as a minimum the following (depending on whether you want to just run it, whether you have the original distribution, etc): If you have the original distribution including the fonts and you just want to run the tool just get the compiled version and run it: get pub/version3.2/vt100tool If you have the fonts and want to recompile the tool: get pub/version3.2/* and pub/version3.2/libdir/*. Run make in the two directories. If you don't have the fonts either: get pub/version3.2/*, pub/version3.2/libdir/* and pub/version3.2/fontdir/*. Run make in the two directories and install the fonts in the correct place. ..and there you are. If you have trouble, send mail and I'll try to help. There have been a few new changes (after 1 July 1987) so you might want to recopy if you got it earlier. Regards, Ed [[ Before everyone asks, I will try to place a copy in the archives when I get the chance. --wnl ]] ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 15 Mar 88 14:54:07 CST From: William LeFebvre Subject: Re: Problem uudecoding 'calc' Reference: v6n27 Turns out that the problem with the 'calc' utility has to do with uninvertible EBCDIC-ASCII translations. If you try to send a uuencoded file through a site that speaks EBCDIC, it will translate the message to EBCDIC on the way in and back to ASCII on the way out and in the process alter some of the characters. The only reasonable solution is to send it along a different path. I have been told that the source to the calculator and the Russel compiler will be available in about a month, but will likely be too large to distribute via the archive service. William LeFebvre ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 29 Feb 88 23:19:57 -0500 From: Steve Dyer Subject: Sun 386 From Computerworld 2/29/88: Sun Microsystems, Inc. will reveal in early April its long-awaited 80386-based microcomputer, able to run both Microsoft Corp.'s MS-DOS and Sun's UNIX-based SunOS operating system, according to Sun. The system, codenamed Roadrunner, will be available in two versions, offering 20- and 25-mhz clock speeds, those sources said. A basic configuration will offer 8M bytes of memory, expandable to 32M bytes. Entry-level pricing for the Sun 386 will be set at about $8000, sources said. Sun Chainman and Chief Executive Officer Scott McNealy declined to comment on the system. Phoenix Technologies Ltd., sources said, provided Sun with a software coprocessor, allowing DOS sessions to be run under Unix through a combination of board-level hardware as well as software. It enables workstations with incompatible operating systems like Unix to simulate a complete IBM Personal Computer environment so that they can run PC based applications. The system is currently being betatested by Sun end-users and OEM's. Sun's Intel Corp. 80386-based system, the company's first Intel-based machine, was developed first at its Billerica, Mass., division. The system has been ready for several months but was delayed while company officials wrestled with positioning issues, sources said. ... Initially, Sun will remarket the system primarily through value- added resellers, thereby avoiding direct competition with IBM PC-compatible makers like Compaq Computer Corp., that sell directly through retail channels. Last November, Sun launched its VAR program. The number of VAR's qualified under that program remains undisclosed. ... ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 1 Mar 88 09:22:08 pst From: ucbcad!island!daniel@ucbvax.berkeley.edu (Dan Smith) Subject: WORM, Tape archiving info sought I would like to hear of experiences people are having with WORM drives for the Sun. The company I work for is going to be evaluating one for archival purposes. I am also interested in 8mm tape backup systems. Please reply to me, and I'll summarize. Thanks! dan dan smith, island graphics, marin co, ca uucp: {ucbvax!ucbcad,sun}!island!daniel uucp: pixar!unicom!daniel, well!daniels Phones: 332 FAST (H), 332 EASY (H), 491 1000 (W) ------------------------------ Date: 29 Feb 88 06:25:03 GMT From: mkhaw@teknowledge-vaxc.arpa (Mike Khaw) Subject: reading mouse clicks from shell? I have an application that I'd rather write as a shell script than a C program, for which I'd like the script to solicit and respond to a mouse click in a manner analogous to "read" in /bin/sh or "set foo = $<" in csh. Any simple way to do this? Thanks, Mike Khaw internet: mkhaw@teknowledge-vaxc.arpa usenet: {uunet|sun|ucbvax|decwrl|uw-beaver}!mkhaw%teknowledge-vaxc.arpa USnail: Teknowledge Inc, 1850 Embarcadero Rd, POB 10119, Palo Alto, CA 94303 ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 29 Feb 88 23:56:40 EST From: sundance@life.pawl.rpi.edu Subject: VT640 tool? Is there a vt640 retrographics emulator for SUN UNIX 4.2 (rel 3.3)? Tektool is too bulky for most of the things I need to do and I need a VT100 emulator for text. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 1 Mar 88 12:00:49 EST From: sunvice!cordis!gls@sun.com (Gls Gary_Schaps_2157) Subject: Anyone have the 900 Mbyte Disk Drive? I would appreciate the chance to contact anyone who has ordered/installed the new 900 Mbyte disk drive. Gary L. Schaps Voice: (305) 551-2157 / 800-327-2490 ext. 2157 Cordis Corporation P.O. Box 025700 ML7A E-mail: sun!sunvice!cordis!gschaps Miami, FL 33102-5700 gatech!codas!novavax!cordis!gschaps ------------------------------ Date: 1 Mar 88 17:47:02 GMT From: sun!rtech!llama!sid@ucbvax.berkeley.edu (Sid Shapiro) Subject: Changing a scsi shoebox from 0 to 1? I've got several 3/60s with one shoebox each. I've just acquired several maxtor shoeboxes and I'd like to add them in. I expect I've got to re-jumper the sun shoebox so that they are addressed as scsi 1 instead of 0 (or whatever). Does anybody know how to do this? Thanks, / Sid / ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 1 Mar 88 15:47:40 EST From: darkstar!brian@uc.msc.umn.edu (Brian Utterback) Subject: More than one dump on a 1/4 inch cartridge tape? Does anyone have any information about using the 1/4 cartridge tapes? I am trying to take dumps with this tape, but unfortunately, I can only seem to get one dump per tape. I have a 141 Mb disk, partioned into / and /usr. / takes 13% of one tape and /usr take 2.13 tapes. I therefore need 4 tapes where I should be able to use 3 tapes and have a comfortable extra on the last tape. Also, is there any way to make an archive of several areas on this kind of tape? I would like to archive my copies of Sun-Spots, TeXHaX and also /usr/local/src, but I can't afford to devote several tapes to the effort. Is there any way that I can write them to tape and then add things later without reading the whole tape and copying to a new tape. I would even consider this if it did not require having the whole tape on disk. I guess what I am saying is that I have very little disk space left, and I cannot afford many tapes. Brian Utterback |UUCP:{ihnp4!cray,sun!tundra}!hall!blu Cray Research Inc. |ARPA:blu%hall.cray.com@uc.msc.umn.edu One Tara Blvd. #301 | Nashua NH. 03062 |Tele:(603) 888-3083 ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 1 Mar 88 15:10:41 PST From: richk@larry.cs.washington.edu (Richard Korry) Subject: Using RAM as disk? We (will) have 3 Sun 3/60s with 12Mb of memory hanging diskless off a 3/280 fileserver/timesharing machine. Is it reasonable to allocate some percentage of the memory to be data ram (i.e. act like a disk) in order to reduce the disk requests to the server? Specifically, I was thing that the intermediate files of 'cc' could be stashed locally. Has this been done and is it worth the hassle? Is there public domain code around to hack the kernel to do this? thanks. rich ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 29 Feb 88 17:39:00 PST From: Doug Moran Subject: sendmail.cf--name server interaction problem & suggested fix (long) [[ For those of yo uwho do not care about this subject, this long message is the last one of the digest. --wnl ]] Synopsis: ========= Attempts to send mail to a Sun from a remote site fails with the sender getting the error message "I refuse to talk to myself" from sendmail on the Sun. This problem does not occur from all remote sites or for all Suns on the network. The critical factors in determining failure seems to be that the remote mailer is NOT sendmail, and that the recipient Sun is a host that is not likely to be in the Internet host table (e.g., it is a recent arrival). I am neither a sendmail nor an SMTP wizard. I have customized and debugged a few sendmail.cf files. This is simply a report of what appears to be happening and a report of a fix that I made that seems to handle the problem. The sections on "Cast of Players" and "Diagnosis" can be skipped if you are interested only in the fix. The Cast of Players: ==================== sri.com: a "remote" TOPS-20 host ai.sri.com: our subdomain, also the host name for the name server for our subdomain pebble: a recently arrived Sun whose Internet number is 192.12.5.67 wedge: another recently arrived Sun stinson: an "old" Sun random: a fake user that we use in testing mail Although "sri.com" is a host at our site, its connection to our subnet is via a slow, heavily loaded link on which time-outs are common. This connection is used as an approximation to connecting to a remote host over the ARPAnet. "stinson" has been on-site for several years and its name was part of the Internet host table distributed prior to the switch to using name servers. It is not known to have ever suffered from the problem described below. "pebble" and "wedge" arrived after the switch to using name servers. Both suffered from the problem described below. The fix described below has been tested by installing it on "wedge" and noticing that the problem persists for "pebble" but does not reoccurred on "wedge". "stinson" and "pebble" are using the exactly the same sendmail.cf file. Diagnosis ========= I sent a message to user "random" on all three Suns listed above via "sri.com" (same effect if sent directly from "sri.com") mail random%pebble.ai.sri.com@sri.com \ random%wedge.ai.sri.com@sri.com \ random%stinson.ai.sri.com@sri.com ... The relevant portion of the error message produced by the unsuccessful attempt to deliver mail to pebble is: ----- Transcript of session follows ----- >>> HELO pebble <<< 553 pebble I refuse to talk to myself 554 ... Service unavailable ----- Unsent message follows ----- Received: from KL.SRI.COM by pebble (3.2/4.16) id AA05732 for random@pebble.ai.sri.com; ...... The message was delivered on both wedge and stinson and the corresponding "Received:" line was Received: from KL.SRI.COM by stinson (3.2/4.16) id AA04432 for random; ...... I haven't discovered the reason for the difference in address in the "for" fields of the "Received:" lines, but it does NOT seem to be a factor in this problem. What I deduce is happening is that "sri.com" does not have the address of "pebble.ai.sri.com" in its database, so it queries our name server ("ai.sri.com") and get the Internet address of "192.12.5.67". "sri.com" might then do a second query to get the host name for that address and have that query times out (or that data may be missing from the database on our name server). Alternatively, the remote mailer may use the internet number in the address on the "envelope" so that any relays won't have to do the same name-to-address mapping. Whatever the cause, the remote mailer sends the message to "pebble" with an address of "random@[192.12.5.67]" on the envelope. "pebble" then attempts to deliver the mail to host address 192.12.5.67 (itself), and detects a potential loop. According to the people I have consulted about the SMTP protocol, "random@[192.12.5.67]" is a valid address. However, it is not an address that sendmail is prepared to handle. If you look in most sendmail.cf files, you will find a set of lines of the form # For numeric spec, you can't pass spec on to receiver, since rcvr's # are not smart enough to know that [x.y.z.a] is their own name. R<@[$+]>:$* $:$>9 <@[$1]>:$2 Clean it up, then... R<@[$+]>:$* $#ether $@[$1] $:$2 numeric internet spec ... Consequently, such systems will put simply "random" on the envelope that it delivers to pebble, and this problem will not occur. However, this would seem to be simply a case of a system avoiding a potential deficiencies in the receiver. The frequency of this problem was in large part due to our use of actual hostnames in the headers, e.g., "pebble.ai.sri.com", instead of using the domainhost ("ai.sri.com") in the reply/return-addr/... fields, and letting the domainhost forward the messages to the user's individual hosts. The reason for doing this was a temporary exigency, which I won't go into. My Fix to sendmail.cf ===================== All the Suns in my cluster normally share a common sendmail.cf file. For each of my Suns, I have added a line of the form R$*<@[InternetAddr]>$* $1<@HOST>$2 at the beginning of ruleset 6 (in my sendmail.cf file, ruleset 6 is called at the end of ruleset 3 and extracts local information for use in ruleset 0). For example, the entry for "pebble" would be R$*<@[192.12.5.67]>$* $1<@pebble>$2 Note: I do not include domain fields ("ai.sri.com") on the RHS because subsequent rules in ruleset 6 strip off any local domain info. Note: Make sure that the above conversion is done before any conversions utilizing $=w (the class of hostnames for the local host). Alternative 1: the Internet numbers could be put in separate files for each Sun and read in via the define-class command ("F"). I rejected this because the above was simpler to administer. Alternative 2: the Internet numbers could be extracted from the hosts table with a command invoked from a "F" define-class command. This would seem to involve to much overhead to be useful. Remember that for multi-homed hosts, "ypmatch" returns only a single address; for them, something like ypcat hosts | grep `hostname` | awk '{print $1}' would be needed. Related Problem =============== Just as "random@[192.12.5.67]" is a valid address, so is "random@#DECIMAL" where DECIMAL is a decimal number representing the internet address. This could be handled in a similar fashion as the above, but since I haven't yet seen any remote mailers generate this form, I haven't bothered with it. Sendmail Enhancement? ===================== It would seem that the sendmail program needs two additional system defined variables similar to $=w (class of names by which the host is known) giving the Internetwork address(es): one in dot notation and one as decimal numbers. Douglas B. Moran AI Center, SRI International ------------------------------ End of SUN-Spots Digest ***********************