ISC 386/ix sysadm filemgmt facilities & cpio

[John Levine]

In article <266 at phavl.UUCP> rob at phavl.UUCP (Robert Ransbottom) writes:
>I would like to alter the "sysadm filemgmt" facilities on 
>Interactive's 386/ix rel. 2.0.1 (2.0.2) to allow the use 
>of the 'C' option to "cpio".  Ideally "slow mode" would
>be an available user option.

All of the sysadm menus are implemented as shell scripts, which are not hard
to change.  The backup command is in /usr/admin/menu/filemgmt/backup, and it
calls /etc/savecpio, which calls /usr/lbin/ncpio, which is a stub that runs
cpio.  It is a moment's work to add the -C flag, probably in /etc/savecpio,
and not much more than that to add an extra question in filemgmt about
whether to run fast or slow.

By the way, in most versions of cpio including 386/ix's, the buffer size it
uses is 10 times bigger than what you ask, e.g. "-C 10240" uses a buffer of
size 102400.  I had lots of mysterious hangs until I realized that when I
asked for a 512000 byte buffer, I was actually asking for a 5 meg buffer,
and it's hard to lock that in core on a 4 meg machine.
-- 
John R. Levine, Segue Software, POB 349, Cambridge MA 02238, +1 617 492 3869
{ima|lotus}!esegue!johnl, johnl at ima.isc.com, Levine at YALE.something
Massachusetts has 64 licensed drivers who are over 100 years old.  -The Globe