A bunch of questions about UUCP on the Unix PC

[Lenny Tropiano]

In article <802 at oswego.Oswego.EDU> ostroff at oswego.UUCP (Boyd Ostroff) writes:
...
|> [description of the console slow-down-and-die 3.51 bug left out]
|>
|>1) Does this sound like the same problem that others have experienced
|>with 3.51 uucp?
|>
Yes.   (more like the phone driver in the 3.51 kernel)

|>2) Will 3.51a really fix it?  Our AT&T users group just got a hold of 3.51a,
|>but nobody has tried to install it yet.  No one else is making much use
|>of uucp on their Unix PCs yet, but they want to in the future, so my
|>experiences will hopefully guide them.
|>
Hopefully temporarily.  But tonight (after 3 months of running 3.51a) I 
reported the similar problems with the slow-down-and-die.  For any consolation
it will slow down the occurances of these crashes.. Especially if your system
is very active with uucp calls.

|>3) If the answer to question 2 is "yes", then what NEW problems might
|>3.51a create for me?  I don't want to "fix" anything that isn't broken.
|>
Nothing apparent, but this doesn't guarantee totally all the fixes are
good, or they will not create others.   

|>5) On a slightly different but related topic, are there any (preferably
|>public-domain) mail programs available?  I don't see any listed in
|>THE STORE! catalog.  The mail(1) provided with the system is pretty limited.
|>Is anything available for SysV through anonymus ftp? 
|>
Elm is a good public domain mail program.  It is available from most
comp.sources.unix sites.  I would suggest getting the Elm 1.7beta version
if you can find it.  It is probably ftp-able from uunet.uu.net.

|>6) FINALLY, I would eventually like to get USENET news on my 3B1.  Is there
|>a version of rn especially for the Unix PC, or is it generic enough that I
|>can get the sources running under Ultrix from my local vax and compile it 
|>under SysV?  I'm really only interested in a handful of newsgroups - how
|>much disk space will the sources/binaries/whatever eat up?  How much will
|>it hog my cpu/disk when it runs?
|>
RN works fine for System V, and compiles nicely on the UNIX pc.  There are
a few peculiarities with the UNIX pc on board modem that about two lines
of code in one of the files needed to be changed (when you get to that
point, mail me and I will point them out).

Binaries aren't all that big especially if you use the Shared libraries
for compiling them on the UNIX pc.  It all depends on how active the groups
are... on how much space they eat up.  I get a semi-full (everything except
for soc, talk, sci) feed and I keep most of the groups for two days - four
days,  It eats up a lot of space ... 24,000 blocks approx.  Oh well.

As far as CPU hogging, I would suggest to do your news uncompressing/batching
at odd(late night) hours.  This way the impact won't be so apparent.

-Lenny

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