Unix PC brain-damaged uucp, Honey DAN BER, etc

[Bill Mayhew]

I see that version 3.51b for the Unix PC may be lurking in the
wings now.  Hmmm.  What I'd like to know is what patches fix what
bugs.  When I bought my 3.51 operating system in october 1987, it
came with a disk labeled "communications patch", which I dutifully
installed at the time I loaded the operating system.  None the less
I had various and sundry crashes and kernel panics on both tty000
and on ph1.  AT&T didn't believe me when I accused the uucp
software of being the rat, and replaced my motherboard instead.
The machine continued to crash repeatedly, so the HOTLINE personell
emailed me a replacement copy of uucico, which proved an
interesting study in frustration, as uucico was the source of the
bugs to begin with!  It took AT&T's machine about six tries to get
it through with a crash or two in between.

The "new" uucico seemed to work better but arrived without any
attendant documentation.  The machine still crashed every couple of
days.

We had gotten HDB from the STORE back when it was on line.  Last
time I checked it had apparently been withdrawn.  That's too bad
since they don't sell HDB now either for the Unix PC.  Anyway, I
was getting frustrated enough with the officially supported
version of uucp that I figured that I didn't have much to lose by
loading up the rebel HDB.  I was quite shocked to find that HDB was
quite well done and looked just like HDB known as "The Basic
Networking Utilities" that comes with the 6300+ or the WGS Unix
brand operating system.  The only difference is that the Unix PC
keeps its locks in /usr/spool/uucp rather than the more customary
/usr/spool/locks.

We use a Unix PC with a 20 meg disk as a communications front end
for our vax.  We run a Trailblazer modem off the tty000 port.  We
decided to roll the dice and try running tty000 at 19.2K buad so
far its been working for us.  We are running a 3b1 on the other
side of town as a news server.  That machine, impulse, also has a
trailblazer.  We routinely transfer files as large as 250K bytes
for news.  With both the Unix PC and 3b1 running HDB we usually
get about 1000 - 1300 characters per second.  I feel pretty
confident about those stats since those are 250 K files.  The
trailblazer modem has about a 30 K byte buffer, so transfers of
small files often give unrealistically high xferstats results.

The point of my meandering is that HDB apparently works and it is
working very well for us.  The question is, why is AT&T not
releasing it?  Must be internal politics or whatever.

I wouldn't mind paying some bucks ($50-$100??) to get an officially
supported upgrade of, say, mailx and the HDB kit? /bin/mail really
is quite an excuse for mail.  I know; use elm or mush.  But it
would be nice to have a good mailer that was a supported product.
One good thing I can say about the original uucp on the 3b1 is I
like the fact that modemcap gives you a little more control over
interpreting modem result codes and bialing out appropriately than
HDB does.

Does anybody know about the status of HDB now that it has been
withdrawn from the STORE?  

Despite its quirks, I still really like my 3b1, and there aren't
too many things around I'd trade it for.  Well, maybe a 386 WGS.

--Bill
  wtm at neoucom.UUCP