Is A/UX Mature? (long response)

[John Michael Sovereign]

In article <> J.Purchase at cs.ucl.ac.uk (Jan Purchase) writes:
> a) Why, after I have used settimezone (as root) to set the system time
> zone to "GB-Eire", does the command "at" fail to work properly....

I believe this is due to a bug in the GB-Eire data file; I have included
a uuencoded version of this file which is a temporary fix.  The only
defect with this file is that it does not know that "summer time"
was in effect throughout 1968-71.

> b) Why do mail headers express the send-time of a message in the
> system time zone in one part and in PDT in the other two?

While the settimezone script states that you only need to logout and
log back in, you really need to reboot to update sendmail and other
daemons' TZ.

> c) Why can one not change the speed of a serial port which does not
> have a getty process associated with it....

Standard System V semantics require the characteristics of a terminal
device be reset to their default values after the last close of the device.
You can workaround this by using a command like the following where
the sleep keeps the device open.

        ( stty 1200; sleep 100000) < /dev/tty1 &

BTW, the flow control characteristics (modem, etc.) ARE preserved,
since this is desirable and they are not defined by the SVID.

> d) Why does wall refuse to write to terminal devices it cannot read
> from?

This "feature" was introduced in 2.0.1 to plug a security hole.  I will
investigate to see if this paranoia can be relaxed enough to allow
non-privileged users to run wall.

> e) Why do talk and write only function if the target terminal device
> is world writable?

This is the "security mechanism" used in these versions; the "tty
group" mechanism you suggest is preferable, I hope that it will be
adopted in a future release.

Cheers,
John Sovereign
jms at apple.com

#include <std/disclaimer.h>
------------------------------------------------------------------
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end