fun with ultrix 1.2 -> 2.2 upgrade
George Robbins
grr at cbmvax.UUCP
Wed Apr 6 08:20:55 AEST 1988
Well, I've just completed (I hope) upgrading our 785 from Ultrix 1.2 to
release 2.2. Things didn't go too badly, execept for one problem of
my own creation. However there were a few strange things not evident
in the release notes that might be worth mentioning. Some of this stuff
may be ancient history for people runing 2.x...
1) The new boot procedure relies on having appropriate boot code in the
boot blocks of the system disk. If the code isn't there, the boot
procedure dies after displaying the message about how many bytes of
code were loaded. The bootrap code will be inserted by newfs'ing
the the a or c partions under 2.2, however this is painful if you've
already built the disk. dd'ing the first 16 blocks of the raw a
partition of a similar disk init'd under 2.2 to the system disk
solved the problem for me.
2) The procedure for updating the console floppy assumes that you
can lay claws on a virgin console floppy for your system. If all
you have handy are configured VMS or Ultrix console floppys, the
new stuff may not fit and it's fairly painful to figure out what
is and isn't needed.
3) The df utility no longer works on raw devices. If you try it, it
treats the device as a normal file and give you information about
the amount of free space on the partition containing the /dev
directory.
4) The /bin/mail program is actually in /usr/bin, with a soft-link
in /bin. If your users have search paths like /usr/bin /usr/ucb
/bin, they will get /bin/mail after the upgrade where before they
would get /usr/ucb/mail. Best thing is to delete the link then
move /usr/bin/mail back to /bin/mail, taking care to preserve the
setuid bits.
5) The DECnet ncp program doesn't give a meaningful error when you
attempt to use it on a system that doesn't have DECnet support
properly configured into the kernel. I screwed up the DECnet
installation, then spent two days trying to figure out why ncp
kept giving me a "listenter: invalid identification format, node:"
message when you tried to "set executor state on". This is
especially painful, since the first thing the verification script
does is "set executor state on".
6) The "args on dev" entry in the config file has been deleted and
now causes a syntax error. The man entry for config however still
makes allusions to specifying the location for "argument processing".
7) The default line characteristics for outgoing uucp calls seems to
have changed to even parity. This may cause problems with auto-
baud detection or logging into systems that you call.
8) The new IOCTL's for dealing with LAT terminal connections are present
in ioctl.h, however there is no documentation and even the few
header files that were present in /sys/lat and /sys/dli in Ultrix
release 1.2 have been removed. Somebody should take a big club to
DEC and make them understand it isn't proper unix form to provide
system services and then refuse to document the user interface.
9) The man entry for dmf(4) mentions that the flags entry with respect
to modem control, but doesn't make clear that the flags for the
6 lines without modem control should always be set to avoid
unpredictable interface operation.
10) As usual, /usr/lib/games/fortune.dat file provided is corrupted and
and /usr/game/fortune gets a floating point error, rather than printing
out either of the entries in the fortunes.dat file. It's also less
that obvious that you have to look in the fortunes.dat file for the
instructions on creating a valid fortunes database.
11) The installation procedure diverges significantly from the traditional
4.x Berekely installation process. Providing a small section in the
installation manual describing the installation process in unix terms
in addition to the step-by-step instructions would be a great help
to experienced installers and people trying to plan an upgrade for an
existing system.
More information about the Comp.unix.ultrix
mailing list