SCO ODT v1.1 - ODT-VIEW Anomaly

[Wu Liu]

/--bbs at alchemy.UUCP (BBS Administration) said...
| I've got several problems that need to be solved with my installation of
| SCO ODT v1.1, but for now I'll ask for help on only this one:
| 
| I had a difficult time getting my system to work with my ethernet card. It
| is a Western Digital 16-bit card, and apparently, the "wdn" driver used by
| ODT does not really work too well with it (I was told the driver is made for
| the WD8003 8-bit version, but that it can be made to work with the 16-bit
| version). I any case, my first attempt at installation failed (I had the
| ethernet card in place during the install and installed the "whole system"
| using the "Automatic" installation). Today, I took the card out and
| started over, installing manually and selecting only ODT-OS and the
| TCP/IP portion of ODT-NET (which installed the ODT-VIEW system by itself).
\--

The WD8013 will work, if you manage to avoid running into any hardware
conflicts.  There is a lab machine here with a WD8013 (in a SystemPro)
which runs like a champ.  Too bad I can't use it as a personal
workstation... :-)

/--
| Once this was installed and seemed to be working okay, I decided to try
| to install the ethernet card. It did take some doing, but eventually I
| got it to work. I could still "ping" and run ODT-VIEW with no problems.
| I then decided to install the "Update F" that came with ODT v1.1 and
| was supposed to fix and enhance various portions of the system. After
| this, I decided to install the "Server Upgrade" floppy as well since
| we were going to be testing the PC-Interface Server by (eventually)
| attaching a '286 machine to this machine (the ethernet card in the ODT
| machine has both ends of its BNC connector terminated with the thin-net
| 50 ohm terminators at present). The server upgrade disk is v1.1 as well.
| 
| After this, the kernel was relinked and I rebooted. At startup, everything
| seemed to be working fine, until I decided to login as "odt" and try to
| launch a Unix shell (either by double-clicking on the ODT-OS icon, or
| by selecting "New Window" from the root menu, etc.). The "odtterm" (or
| maybe it's an xterm) is launched, but as soon as ANY key is pressed
| within this new window, the window closes. No crash, no corrupted windows
| or anything, it just acts like you selected "Close" from its window menu
| or something. Very strange! Of course, this makes using ODT-VIEW rather
| useless since "Help", "Sysadmsh", "Mail" and many other icons/programs
| rely on "odtterm/xterm" to function properly.
| 
| I was hoping someone might have experienced this and could say "It was 
| when you installed the 'Update F' disk, do this..." or "The Server Upgrade
| messes that up, do this...". The truly interesting thing about this is
| that we originally had ODT v1.0 and encountered this same situation.
| Everything, eventually, worked fine except that launching an "xterm"
| from ODT-VIEW would result in the same action: the window closes once
| you press any key (this is, well, not totally, but sort of primarily
| why we wanted ODT v1.1 thinking it would solve this problem). I'm
| wondering if it's a hardware related problem now. Any hints or help
| are greatly appreciated!
\--

Sounds like you're running out of some sort of kernel resource.  Good
things to look at are streams buffers and queues (run crash and use the
command "strstat" to find out the status of your streams resources),
process table size (NPROC), and region table size (NREGION).  You may
also be running out of pseudo-ttys.

Have you tried calling or sending e-mail to SCO Support?  They're pretty
good at handling things like this.