Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!ncrlnk!ncr-sd!hp-sdd!hplabs!ucbvax!NOTE.NSF.GOV!mmorse
From: mmorse@NOTE.NSF.GOV (Michael Morse)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re: pop2 and PC-NFS Lifeline
Message-ID: <8810041516.aa07877@note.nsf.gov>
Date: 4 Oct 88 19:16:33 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 60


> After months of work and chasing down mulitple bugs we have brought up
> PC-NFS v 3.0.  Unfortunately, after we installed Lifeline (the pop2 client)
> for a PC, we find that it is NOT a TSR and thus has limited (if any real)
> usefulness.  

   You don't say what kind of PC you run, but my experience was
completely different.  I just loaded the software and it ran.  I had
to make some modifications to the POP server to make it work with
MMDF, but it ran out of the box with sendmail.  The Mail user
interface is too big to run as a TSR, but that doesn't make
it much less useful.  The user interface is so good it beats anything
running on a time-sharing machine (like our poor overloaded VAX).  It
is very fast and easy to use.  It compares with the best PC programs,
which are head and shoulders above anything available on a tty
connected to a central host.

   If TSR is of critical importance (obviously it's not for me), you
might want to look into one of the "context switching" programs for
DOS such as Desqview or DoubleDOS.  They should allow you to keep
LifeLine in memory, assuming you have enough memory to load LifeLine
and other programs.


> Has anyone created a pop2 client for the PC that will coexist
> with PC-NFS and remain as a TSR so that mail delivery is always available
> and relatively transparent?

   The pop2 client probably wouldn't be that difficult.  The problem is to
make a reasonably useful user interface that could be memory resident
on a PC.  I've never seen one.  In order to save memory so you can run
it TSR, you must delete functions.  This means that you have two user
interfaces, one full-blown to run from the DOS prompt, and one
stripped-down to run TSR.  My experience with the stripped down ones is
that you start to use it and become frustrated each time you want to
use a feature only available in the full version.  The solution most
vendors implement is to provide a small TSR product that only informs
you of mail, and perhaps gives the subject lines.  You still have to
exit your DOS application and start up mail if you want to read and
reply to the mail.  I think you'll just have to wait for OS/2.  The DOS
640K barrier is just too big a restriction. 

> Also, just as a general comment is everyone having a difficult time getting
> SUN to support PC-NFS?

My feeling was that it was a good thing that the software was so good,
because I couldn't get any information out of SUN.  The support people
admitted that they had never actually seen the product (PC-NFS), much
less used it.  I was never able to get in touch with anyone who knew
any more about the program than I could glean from the documentation.
This was many months ago, so things may have improved drastically in
the meantime.  It's obvious that there are some people at SUN who are
very sharp PC programmers, but they keep them pretty well protected
from their users.

--Mike

Michael Morse                           Internet: mmorse@note.nsf.gov
National Science Foundation               BITNET: mmorse@NSF
                                       Telephone: (202) 357-7659