Users of Wollongong's WIN/3B Release 2.1

[Paul H. Allen]

Last summer, I upgraded four 3B2/400s and one 3B2/600 to Wollongong's
"Enhanced" TCP/IP WIN/3B, Release 2.1 (WIN is a Trademark of The Wollongong
Group, Inc).  These computers belong to the graduate computer science
department which is highly dependent on their network.  The faculty and
students soon found out that the software had some serious problems and
looked to me for some answers.  I couldn't believe how much functionality
we lost.

Specific problems that we experienced:

1. The remote rn, "rrn", failed due to the system functions, "read" and "write"
not working properly.  I finally gave up and rewrote the networking code
using the TLI library.

2. All printing is done on a Citoh and Epson printer via remote shell to
the 3B2/600 from 3b1s.  Unfortunately, large files failed to print completely
due to truncation by the remote shell.  One grad. student told me he considered
a large file to be at least 5 pages. :-<

3. Screendumps from the 3b1 to the laser printer via remote shell to one
of the 3B2/400s completely failed.  Well, sometimes you would get a
partial printing.

4. I use to backup my 40 meg. hard disk to the 3B2/600's 60 meg SCSI tape
drive by executing,

 find pha -depth -print | cpio -oBc | remsh ma "dd of=/dev/rSA/qtape1 bs=10b"

But for some reason or other, the command failed complaining about
"too many processes".  Huh? it use to work before the upgrade!

5. Now the undergrads fill their labs with suns that currently operate
SunOS4.0 (SunOS is a trademark of Sun Microsystems, Incorporated).  Since
I am one of the maintainers of the CS Departments equipment, I occasionally
have a need to transfer files between the Suns and 3B2s.  I could transfer
a file by ftp if the sun was doing the "getting" and "putting" but the 3B2
failed, usually producing a zero byte file.

We made all types of noise and finally got the attention of the right people in
that massive AT&T bureaucracy.  Most of our problems have been solved by the
efforts of an individual belonging to the AT&T's Tier 4 support group in
Illinois.

What is this article about?  You won't believe this, BUT, that same AT&T
bureaucracy claims WE are the only ones that have these problems with this
sofeware, at least that is what they tell our salesman.  So, our salesman
asked me to query the readers of this net regarding their experience with
Wollongong's TCP/IP.  At least I know better, I've been reading this group
for quite a while now.  AND, if you are still having problems, I've been
told, that if you respond, someone from AT&T will contact you.  No kidding!

Paul Allen
...!rutgers!rochester!rit!pha               Rochester Institute of Technology
pha at cs.rit.edu                              Computer Science Dept.
pha1775 at ritvax                              One Lomb Memorial Drive
                                            Post Office Box 9887
                                            Rochester, New York 14623-0877