Sun-Spots Digest, v6n263
William LeFebvre
Sun-Spots-Request at Rice.edu
Thu Oct 20 02:34:15 AEST 1988
SUN-SPOTS DIGEST Tuesday, 18 October 1988 Volume 6 : Issue 263
Today's Topics:
Why is comp.sys.sun/sun-spots moderated/digestified (2)
Re: Extension cables
Re: DEC LANBRIDGE 100/Sun 4 problems
Re: Bitnet mangles source files
Re: SunOS 4.0 Suntools speedup
Re: Word Processors on Sun/Unix
Encoding ASCII Files
Problem with FPU on SUN 4/110
CDC 94181 Drive problem
Audible appointment notification in calentool?
Motorola S-Records on Sun 3/160s?
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----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 28 Sep 88 04:24:19 GMT
From: casey at cs.ucla.edu
Subject: Why is comp.sys.sun/sun-spots moderated/digestified?
I know that this has been hashed over in the past, but I still have yet to
hear a real reason for why sun-spots is moderated and digestified.
At best, whoever the moderator is is totally flooded with mail to the list
which must suck up an enormous amount of his time. At worst, the
moderator goes on vacation and we get a big delay seeing anything for a
bit and then he has to deal with an unbelievable backlog when he gets
back.
[[ Just to clarify: The last time I was out of town was the July 4th
weekend (and that was to attend a wedding). What usually happens is I get
busy doing the things I'm suppoesed to be doing. You know...research.
--wnl ]]
Add to that the inconvenience of having to deal with the digests and it
seems to me you have a formula that says this isn't workable. I don't get
the advantages of whatever my favorite news/mail reader offers in its
current format. Either that, or I have to unpack the stupid digests and
apply a new session of my reader against that. And at the volume of
sun-spots this is ridiculous.
Moderation and digestification seems like a fine idea for a low volume
group where you want to maintain a coherent conversation theme, weed out
the irrelevant, etc., but sun-spots is not low volume and the interests of
Sun users are now so diverse that it's difficult to determine what is
irrelevant.
I'd like to have a voting session to decide whether sun-spots should be
converted to an unmoderated, undigestified news group / mailing list.
Probably voting on moderation and digestification should be separate. For
instance, comp.unix.ultrix is moderated, but undigestified. Of course
digestified, but unmoderated doesn't make sense.
P.S. I hope no one takes this as a criticism of the job that William
LeFebvre <phil at rice.edu> has been doing. On the contrary, I think that
he's been doing a great job. I just think that the job itself is probably
a lot of work for what I believe has very little benefit.
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 12 Oct 88 15:13:56 CDT
From: William LeFebvre <phil at Rice.edu>
Subject: Why is comp.sys.sun/sun-spots moderated/digestified (2)
I had a quick mail conversation with Casey, in which I discovered that he
reads comp.sys.sun via Usenet. There is a tremendous difference between
the Internet and the Usenet environments. All Internet "interest groups"
are mail based: a submission is sent to a given address and the message
gets redistributed to everyone on the main list. Messages on the Usenet
are broadcasted: each site sends a copy to all its neighbors that don't
already have copies. This list started as an Internet interest group
called "Sun-Spots". At that time, Rice was not even on the Internet. We
had no choice but to send the messages out in digested form, and that also
meant having it moderated. Someone soon decided that it would be a good
idea to gateway the digests onto a Usenet list. Since that time, our
facilites at Rice have improved tremendously. We have a very reliable
connection to (most of) the Internet and we are a Usenet site.
Unfortunately, we still have only one machine (and a Sun 2 at that)
handling all our Internetwork mail. It has enough trouble delivering one
or two digests a day to over 500 addresses. I cannot imagine flooding
that machine with 15 to 30 messages a day. So, for the time being, the
Internet side must remain in digest form. However, I feel that it is
possible (and, in fact, rather easy) to undigest the Usenet side. But I
want the readers' opinions first. Casey proposed a vote, and I would like
to carry it out:
VOTE FOR ONE:
[ ] A: Moderated and digestified
[ ] B: Moderated but not digestified
[ ] C: Unmoderated (and of course undigestified).
DEMOGRAPHICS: How do you read Sun-Spots digests:
[ ] 1: Via Usenet (readnews, rn, notes)
[ ] 2: Via Internet
Please mail your votes to the address "votes at titan.rice.edu". Make *sure*
that you use that specific address and no other. By the way, I already
have Casey's vote.
If a solid majority of the Usenet readers want to do away with
digestification, then it will happen in short order. Beyond that, this is
primarily an opinion poll (because any other changes cannot happen any
time soon).
William LeFebvre
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 13 Oct 88 07:04:13 EDT
From: chuck at wooglin.scc.com (Charles Williams)
Subject: Re: Extension cables
First, thanks to all of you who replied to my request for extension cables.
The situtation for extension cables is as follows:
1) buy the cable & connectors and make them yourself, or
2) buy them from Artecon. Artecon sells extension kits (which include video,
keyboard, and mouse(?) extension cables) in either 70 or 100 ft length.
High resolution monchrome monitors can only be extended 70 ft before the
video signal begins to breakup (although I imagine a signal booster could
be used.) The Artecon kits run for $695.00 (that's not a typo!!). The vital
info for Artecon is: Phone 619-931-5500 or 800-USA-ARTE (872-2783). Ask for
Katherine Hartsell or Lucky Morrison.
Chuck Williams
Contel Federal Systems
All remarks made here are my own, etc., etc., etc.
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 13 Oct 88 10:43:02 EDT
From: jas at proteon.com (John A. Shriver)
Subject: Re: DEC LANBRIDGE 100/Sun 4 problems
If a LANBridge 100 has stopped forwarding broadcast packets, you may have
encountered a bug in some versions of their software. In some versions
(not the first, not the latest), if someone sends an Ethernet packet with
a source address of FFFFFFFFFFFF, then LANBridge will gladly put that into
the address table for that Ethernet. Forever afterwards, that LANBridge
will not forward broadcast packets from that Ethernet, since it "knows"
that FFFFFFFFFFFF is on that Ethernet, so it does not need to forward the
packet. Power-cycling flushes the address tables, fixing it.
The fix is never to consider FFFFFFFFFFFF as an address for inclusion in
the address tables.
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 13 Oct 88 9:07:15 BST
From: Colin Walls <ctw%CNS.UMIST.AC.UK at cunyvm.cuny.edu>
Subject: Re: Bitnet mangles source files
We have multiple problems going through BITNET machines. Firstly tabs are
expanded and not always to the default spacing of 8 characters. This
plays havoc with Makefiles. Secondly ``long'' lines, i.e. more than 80
characters after expansion get folded onto a second line, playing havoc
with patches. Last and worst we get character transliteration, uparrow
() going to tilde (^) and tilde going to percent (%). The killer is that
percent doesn't get transliterated at all!
Colin Walls
Janet: Colin at uk.ac.umist
DARPA: Colin at umist.ac.uk
Uucp: ukc!umist.ac.uk!Colin
Tel: 061-236-3311 x 2626
International: +44-61-228-3311 x 2626
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 13 Oct 88 10:19:14 PDT
From: stevo at judy.jpl.nasa.gov (Steve Groom)
Subject: Re: SunOS 4.0 Suntools speedup
>From: dg-rtp!meissner at mcnc.org (Michael Meissner)
>This is relayed from our Sunyvale people who helped Sun find it, but for
>some reason, Sun isn't publishing it.
>...
>the patch:
>Edit /etc/syslog.conf and enter the following line before the first
>non-comment line, starting in column 1 (note the comma space):
>define(LOGFILE, 1)
>...
This is documented in the "SunOS Release 4.0 READ THIS FIRST", which was
included with your 4.0 distribution tapes. (Rev A, 9 May 1988, Part No:
800-1737-15). [[ Another poster pointed put that it was on page 3,
item 7. --wnl ]] It amazes me how many people seem to just skip this
stuff. I might be tempted to, knowing how many "READ ME FIRST" notices
that come with a SunOS release, but the way I see it, they don't go to the
trouble of including those things for nothing!
[[ All together now: "RTFM!" ;-) --wnl ]]
And yes, the patch described does make a big difference in performance for
two reasons. First, syslogd stops chewing up all your idle CPU time (and
then some), and second, it stops generating error messages that gradually
fill up /var.
Steve Groom, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA 91109
Internet: stevo at elroy.jpl.nasa.gov UUCP: {ames,cit-vax}!elroy!stevo
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 13 Oct 88 08:11:42 EDT
From: Chuck Musciano <chuck at trantor.harris-atd.com>
Subject: Re: Word Processors on Sun/Unix
> Where can I get info on popular word processing packages on the Sun?
We are very happy with Frame Maker, from Frame Technology. It is a
WYSIWYG doc-gen package with a variety of graphical and textual features.
It can drive PostScript printers, like the LaserWriter. We do everything
from memos to viewgraphs to reference manuals in it. You can get a demo
copy by sending a blank tape to Frame Technology. Call 1-408-433-3311 for
more info, or send a message to sun!frame!comments (frame!comments at sun.com
for InterNetters). Service is good (usually 24 hour acknowledgement of
all e-mail) and the people are friendly and competent.
Chuck Musciano
Advanced Technology Department
Harris Corporation
(407) 727-6131
ARPA: chuck at trantor.harris-atd.com
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 13 Oct 88 08:03:25 EDT
From: Chuck Musciano <chuck at trantor.harris-atd.com>
Subject: Encoding ASCII Files
Well, perhaps my recent posting about encoding files was warranted. I
have discovered that uu{en,de}code uses the 64 characters from the middle
of ASCII, beginning with ' ':
" !"#$%&'()*+,-./0123456789:;<=>?@ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ[\]^_"
[ Everybody, check this line against ASCII 0x20 through 0x5f to see how your
mailer really did. -chuck ]
If everyone will get out their System/360 green card (children in the
audience will not know of what I speak) [[ mine's yellow...I guess because
it's a 370 card. --wnl ]], you will note that EBCDIC does not have a '^'
character. Thus EBCDIC/ASCII translation of uuencoded files is doomed.
Further, Ole Nielsen reports that Bitnet mailers strip trailing blanks
from lines, and convert all tabs to four blanks. The former further
confuses uudecode, the latter ruins plaintext makefiles.
Several people have sent programs which encode into [a-zA-Z0-9+-]. This
is a good idea, but how do we bootstrap this process and distribute the
encode/decode tools to everyone? I'd be glad to drive this process, if
anyone has any good ideas...
[[ Iain Fleming and I did some experimenting with this problem, and now I
can't find the appropriate messages. There is a Bitnet node between him
and I that does (at least) the following munging (and this is from
memory): '{' -> '^G', '}' -> '$', '~' -> '^', '^' -> something I can't
remember. Anyone remember the first PostScript file for Sun binder
labels? It had this munging done to it, especially to "{" and "}".
Fortunately, uu{en,de}code doesn't use most of those, but it does use
carat ('^'). --wnl ]]
Chuck Musciano
Advanced Technology Department
Harris Corporation
(407) 727-6131
ARPA: chuck at trantor.harris-atd.com
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 13 Oct 88 10:19:28 EDT
From: russ at baklava.mitre.org (Russell Leighton)
Subject: Problem with FPU on SUN 4/110
On delivery of our Sun 4/110's the README ME FIRST page of the documentation
read:
FPU Option Deficiency
The following information applies only if you have an FPU equipped
4100 CPU board, and only if the board or FPU upgrade was ordered
before October 1st 1988.
There are several deficient performance factors in FPU chips shipped
prior to October 1988. These factors will cause the chip to under-
perform its design specification during heavy "number crunching" or
benchmarking processes. There should be no indication of deficient
performance during normal operation of the system.
We bought our 4/110s for number crunching! Is there a fix for this? My
Sun rep never seems to get back to me on this point.
Russ
ARPA: russ at mitre.arpa
Russell Leighton
M.S. Z406
MITRE Signal Processing Lab
7525 Colshire Dr.
McLean, Va. 22102
USA
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 13 Oct 88 10:01:43 PDT
From: geoffb at ale.ind.trw.com (G. Geoffrey Baehr)
Subject: CDC 94181 Drive problem
Folks, has anyone seen problems connecting CDC 94181 SCSI drives to a SUN
3/280 using the SUN VME SCSI controller ? These are 620 Mb 5.25" drives;
when connected to the SCSI Bus, they hang up the bus by not acknowledging
extended write/read commands. Short ( < 512 byte) write/reads are fine,
but long/multiple ones inevitably result in a hang, the controller in the
3/280 never sees the ack and sits, waiting forever for it. The host must
be rebooted to clear the bus. The problem here is probably related to the
new Emulex SCSI controller on each drive, since they are integrated with
the drive and also have no easily ( read as " all surface mount
components") changeable PROMS or other configurable part, are we out of
luck ? Yes, we fooled with 'em for several days of continuous effort and
are out of ideas. Is this another manifestation of a not quite SCSI
compliant implementation on someone's part ? By the way, the SUN is using
3.5 SUN/OS.
Replies will be summarized to the list. Thanks!
geoffrey baehr
TRW
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 13 Oct 88 10:09:33 EDT
From: Craig Sarazin <cls7i at astsun2.acc.virginia.edu>
Subject: Audible appointment notification in calentool?
I have recently started to use the Sunwindows tool "calentool" to keep
track of appointments, and I really like it. It makes it easy look at
several weeks at a time. The program "calenmail" sends you mail when you
log in, reminding you of your appointments that day.
I do think that there is one major flaw in calentool, and I was wondering
if anyone knew of a fix for this problem. When your appointments arrive,
calentool "notifies" you by turning the icon for the tool to reverse
video. (Normally, you would only have the window open when you were
entering appointments, and would leave it closed to an icon most of the
time.) The problem with the change to reverse video is that it is very
hard to notice if you are not working on the Sun, or you are talking on
the phone, or even if you are working intently in some other window on the
Sun. It would be much better if calentool also notified you by ringing
the bell. This works very well with "mailtool", which reverses the icon,
rings the bell twice, and changes to the "mail in the box" icon.
Does anyone know of a fix for this? It is preferable to mail replies
directly to me, but I also read this news regularly.
Craig Sarazin cls7i at virginia.edu
Department of Astronomy BITNET: cls7i at virginia
Univ. of Virginia Phone: 804-924-4903
Charlottesville, VA 22903
------------------------------
Date: 12 Oct 88 11:23:01 GMT
From: Malcolm Cook <mcvax!cs.kl.ac.uk!malcolmc at uunet.uu.net>
Subject: Motorola S-Records on Sun 3/160s?
I am looking for a program to compile Motorola S-Records from standard
68000 assembler code. I am thinking of using a Burr-Brown MPV940
Intelligent I/O controller to provide real time control on a Sun 3/160.
Any information on the use of the Burr-Brown board would be most
appreciated aswell.
Yours a prospective buyer,
Malcolm
------------------------------
End of SUN-Spots Digest
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