HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: yvent@ntua.gr (Yannis Ventikos)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sun.admin
Subject: DNS & Resolver. Things Sun should do.
Summary: A brief suggestion for improving the SunOS manuals and libs
Keywords: DNS
Date: 24 Jul 92 13:13:50 GMT
Organization: National Technical University of Athens


I have been reading the comp.sys.sun.admin newsgroup for a couple of
months now and an issue that keeps on coming up is setting up DNS and
being able to resolv names. Articles come and go, and I have seen 
answers ranging from very good to ......... 
You can do anything you want on a Sun: run NIS or don't, run primary
secondary or nothing, resolving is possible. What is practically impossible is 
to figure out what one must do to get things going.... from the Sun manual.
I went through this myself sometime ago and the only thing that pulled
me through was copies of DNS files from sites where things worked and
MAINLY asking people who knew what was all about (Software PhD students 
of course!) I really feel sorry for people who are on their own and are
trying to get resolved names for telnet and don't but "nslookup runs great".
	What should be done? Since posting news articles is definitely not
something everybody can do, I suggest that the Sun people should do a better
job in this aspect.
I would like to see Sun coming up with sys.admin's manuals that cover
the subject properly and with libc.so.x.y.z libraries that check the
/etc/hosts file first if in.named is not runing and resolv.conf is not present,
libraries that won't need relinking and can run under all situations. This 
isn't too hard, I have heard that there are already releases that do this, but
I want them on all Suns distributed.
Things are running properly in my site now, but this will probably save
some poor man from weeks of headache.
Yiannis Ventikos
N.A.M.E., N.T.U. Athens, Greece
yvent@areti.marinentua.ariadne-t.gr
yvent@theseas.ntua.gr (news server)
From: badger@squid.inmet (John Reardon)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sun.admin
Subject: weird booting problem
Date: 29 Jul 92 19:25:52 GMT
Reply-To: badger@inmet.com
Organization: Intermetrics, Inc.

My system: 3/60, 8MB, Micropolis 141MB (sd0), Wren 327MB(sd2)

I am new to home system administration and I committed a big "no-no".  I
needed more room on /tmp to compile so I "temporarily" moved /sbin to
another partition.  To make a long story short, I forgot to move it back
so the next time I did a reboot everything was hosed.  I managed to
install and boot miniroot.  With that, I mounted the proper drive and
moved /sbin back to where it should be.  Now I try to reboot and I get
through the part where it should check the filesystems and it just sits
there doing nothing.  No error message, no disk accessing, nothing.
Anyone have any ideas?
--

____________________________________________________________________________
 John Reardon   	    				Intermetrics, Inc.
 badger@Inmet.com       			        733 Concord Ave.
 (617) 661-1840 x4624     				Cambridge, MA 02138
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
From: ibarrac@kzin.fiu.edu (Carlos A. Ibarra)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sun.admin
Subject: Amd is not perfect
Date: 31 Jul 92 00:07:41 GMT
Organization: Florida International Univ.

For those people switching to the Amd automounter, a word of warning.
We run amd on many of our machines and on our file servers. Everybody's
directory is accessible through /homes/username, the /net/host map is
enabled, plus other filesystems are reachable through /home/filesystem.
 
Around once a month, all the processes referencing files through amd on
one of our servers get stuck. A ps shows them all in DW state. Meanwhile,
amd is happily running fine. The load increases monotonically. Each new
process which attempts to access a filesystem through the automounter,
gets stuck in kernel wait. Sometimes, if we are lucky, this stops by itself.
The load goes back down and everything works fine. Other times we have
to resort to a reboot. It looks to me like some kind of deadlock, but
I have not been able to find out where the cyclical wait occurs. It may
also be an amd bug.

This used to happen a lot before with Sun's automounter. Amd reduced, but
did not eliminate, the frequency of this problem.
Xref: sparky comp.sys.sun.admin:4924 comp.sys.sun.hardware:3514
From: mcdono@code-541 (Tim McDonough CSC Room 191 Phone 553 3102 )
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sun.admin,comp.sys.sun.hardware
Subject: Failing Maxtor 1gig drive on SPARC1E
Date: 23 Jul 92 21:53:52 GMT
Reply-To: mcdono@code-541
Organization: Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Greetings:

	I've been having problems with a Maxtor Panther SCSI drive
	( PO-12S 1gig ) connected to a SPARC1E board ( 4.1e ). 
	The disk had countless read errors like the two below and
	the machine soon panicked. Fsck complained of numerous 
	unreadable sequential blocks in several areas.
	Format/analyze ( test/compare ) ran without a problem.
	Puzzled, I formatted the disk, ran newfs/fsck all without
	a problem. Disk is currently in use and ok.
	Questions: If fsck is reporting errors, shouldn't format
		   find them as well? Is this disk ok?
		   
/etc/fstab: /dev/sd0d 	   /var/data 		4.2 rw 1 1

Jul 21 10:51:34 system vmunix: pos = 4, i = 347, fs = /var/data
Jul 21 10:51:34 system vmunix: panic: alloccgblk: can't find blk in cyl

Jul 21 11:49:17 system vmunix: sd0d:   Error for command 'read'
Jul 21 11:49:17 system vmunix: sd0d:   Error Level: Retryable
Jul 21 11:49:17 system vmunix: sd0d:   Block a2, Absolute Block: a0
Jul 21 11:49:17 system vmunix: sd0d:   Sense Key: Media Error
Jul 21 11:49:17 system vmunix: sd0d:   Vendor 'MAXTOR' error code: 0xg1
Jul 22 07:29:36 system vmunix: sd0d:   Error for command 'read'
Jul 22 07:29:36 system vmunix: sd0d:   Error Level: Retryable
Jul 22 07:29:36 system vmunix: sd0d:   Block a0, Absolute Block: a0
Jul 22 07:29:36 system vmunix: sd0d:   Sense Key: Media Error
Jul 22 07:29:36 system vmunix: sd0d:   Vendor 'MAXTOR' error code: 0xg1
---
Tim McDonough                   |   The opinions voiced are my own and
Computer Sciences Corp.         |   do not reflect those of my employer
mcdono@sunspot.nosc.mil         |   or the Susquehanna Hat Company.


Newsgroups: comp.sys.sun.admin,mail.sun-managers
From: etsiao@joule (Eddie Tsiao)
Subject: Re: ATTENTION: A problem with dump under 4.1.1
Organization: California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
Date: Tue, 21 Jul 1992 19:50:06 GMT

In article <1992Jul20.073110.20195@aristo.tau.ac.il> shani@GENIUS.TAU.AC.IL (Oren Shani) writes:
>Hello

Omitted...

>about once in two weeks with a writeback error. It took us some time to
>realize that this is due to another problem and to notice that it happens while
>performing the backups, but once we did, we called Sun technicians. The
>technicians tried to replace everything - from the SCSI cable to eventually, the
>whole computer - but it didn't help. In fact, after the ROM revision was 
>upgraded, the problem got even worse - the computer now gets stuck with some
>strange memory error on the console, and can be revived only by turning the
>power on and off. Meanwhile our Exabyte died (something with it's r/w head,
>probably have nothing to do with this), so we no longer use it, we don't use
>mt either because we backup either to a free disk partition or to a remote
>computer, and the crashes still continue.
>
>  After every link of the chain was checked (Hardware, SCSI, Exabyte, mt) we
>have to conclude that the problem is with dump. So I would like you all to take
>note, and let me know if you encounter anything that supports this suspicion.
>
>-- 
>    __    __  Oren Shani (shani@genius.tau.ac.il) 
>   /  /  /    Faculty of Engineering, Tel Aviv university
>  /  /   --   Israel
> /__/ . __/ . "Hold your temper" -- The caterpillar to Alice

We have had (are having?) similar problems.  We occationally get an error:

  DUMP: Tape write error 753 feet into tape 1
  DUMP: fopen on /dev/tty fails
  DUMP: The ENTIRE dump is aborted.

At first, we suspected the tape but the same tape often worked fine for the 
next dump.  More recently, we've been getting SCSI timeout errors during
backup.  I am now in the process of switching cables etc.  I first changed
servers but that didn't help.  Now, I've changed the cable and am using the
other SCSI port on the drive.  I'm waiting for more problems to crop up.
If anybody knows, definately, that there is a problem with dump, please post
it.  Thanks.

			- E.T.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|Eddie Tsiao                               | etsiao@onramp.ARDFA.CalPoly.EDU |
|System Administrator                      | Voice:   (805) 756-1706         |
|ARDFA Cal Poly,  San Luis Obispo          | FAX:     (805) 756-1702         |
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: gm35@prism.gatech.EDU (Greg Montgomery)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sun.admin
Subject: Where are patches for SunOS v4.1.2.?????
Date: 31 Jul 92 18:43:06 GMT
Organization: Georgia Institute of Technology

As I said in a post I made the other day, I'm about to upgrade to 4.1.2 from
4.1.1. Somebody mentioned to me that I need to install some security patches
for v4.1.2. Does anybody know where they are located at? I haven't seen any
patches around for 4.1.2, only older versions of SunOS. I looked at
ftp.uu.net in vendor/sun/sun-fixes, and I saw some patches, but I`m not sure
which ones are for 4.1.2.

Please let me know..

Thanks!

Greg

-- 
Greg Montgomery
Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta Georgia, 30332
uucp:	  ...!{decvax,hplabs,ncar,purdue,rutgers}!gatech!prism!gm35
Internet: gm35@prism.gatech.edu
From: cudep@warwick.ac.uk (Ian Dickinson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sun.admin
Subject: Re: Sun Screen Savers
Date: 31 Jul 92 14:22:47 GMT
Organization: Team Limpid's Meathead With Aptitude - Kunst und Wahnsinn

In article <qxfnbsfl@csv.warwick.ac.uk> cudep@warwick.ac.uk (Ian Dickinson) writes:
>An entry such as:
>
>console "/usr/local/etc/screensaver console"    sun             on
>
>in /etc/ttytab, and a program (/usr/local/etc/screensaver) which calls up
>some pretty screensaver - we use crabs - which exits on a keypress,
>then calls getty.

A few people have asked for this, so:

We've lost the source to the screensaver program, but it shouldn't
take more than about 1/2 an hour to recreate.

crabs can be found as ftp.warwick.ac.uk:/pub/misc/crabs.c.Z

It uses the pixrect library, but as we all know by now, the sunview related
stuff isn't going to be there under Solaris 2.0.  What's the best way to talk
to the frame buffer at that point?  I don't want to rely on the X screen
blanking since I don't want to run xdm on workstations (yet).  In fact,
is it going to be possible to run anything in this fashion anyway?  Its
big advantage (for our situation) is that you don't need the screenblank
program running all the time.  It only runs when no one is logged in.

Cheers,
--
-- 
\/ato - Ian Dickinson - NIC handle: ID17                              Yo! Bum 
vato@csv.warwick.ac.uk  ...!mcsun!uknet!warwick!vato                     rush
/I=I/S=Dickinson/OU=CSV/O=Warwick/PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/                 the
@c=GB@o=University of Warwick@ou=Computing Services@cn=Ian Dickinson     show
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sun.admin,comp.unix.admin
From: brenner@ucunix.san.uc.edu (David L. Brenner)
Subject: Two printers on one print server
Organization: University of Cincinnati
Date: Thu, 23 Jul 92 14:10:26 GMT

I have an IPC and want to use it as a print server.  I have two
SPARCPrinters and want to set them up so that if one printer is busy the
other one will get the new print jobs.

Has anyone done this?  If so, please let me know how you did it.

Please respond via e-mail.

Thanks in advance.

David Brenner
brenner@ucunix.san.uc.edu
-- 
David L. Brenner                         brenner@ucunix.san.uc.edu
"Sorry, guys -- breaking into computers and writing a stupid virus
 doesn't make you a hacker.  It's not that easy."
  -- Robert Stevenson, Computerworld
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sun.admin,comp.sys.sun.misc
From: chetal@is.morgan.com (Pradeep Chetal)
Subject: Re: How much physical memory?
Organization: Morgan Stanley & Company
Date: Thu, 30 Jul 1992 09:53:12 GMT

In article <ASHERMAN.92Jul29114658@laser.fmrco.com> asherman@laser.fmrco.com (Aaron Sherman) writes:

   From perl (or C if I have to) how can I find out how much PHYSICAL
   memory a system has? I've been looking at /usr/adm/messages*, but on
   systems that haven't re-booted recently there is nothing left.

   I am doing this from a perl script, so perusing files or running an
   existing program would be the easiest, but if the only thing I can do
   is write a C program, then that's fine.

   Thanks. And, please reply via Email, I will summarize any responses.

			   -AJS

I picked this perl script from net itself. If you have ONLY sun's , you may
wanna use pagesize(1) rather than hard-coded value.

#!/usr/local/bin/perl
#
# I think for Sun-3's you divide by 128
#
$_ = `adb -k /vmunix /dev/mem </dev/null 2>&1`;
if (/physmem\s+(.*)/) {
    print "Physical memory is ", int(hex($1) / 256 + 1), " megs\n";
}
else {
    die $_;
}


/Pradeep
--
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Pradeep Chetal                                          Phone: 81-3-3286-9678
Information Services Deptartment                          FAX: 81-3-3286-9040
Morgan Stanley Japan Ltd.  Tokyo Branch            E-mail: chetal@is.morgan.com
        Ote Center Bldg. 3F, 1-1-3 Otemachi, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 100
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sun.admin
From: dhinds@leland.Stanford.EDU (David Hinds)
Subject: Trouble with bad block repair on SCSI drive
Organization: DSG, Stanford University, CA 94305, USA
Date: Mon, 27 Jul 92 04:44:18 GMT

I'm trying to fix a bad block in the root partition on our Sun 4/330,
so far without success.  The hard drive is a CDC Wren IV, with the MD21
SCSI controller.  Now, the system is sort of limping along; every few
minutes, it will freeze up with messages like:

> sd6a:  read retry, block 6736 (6736 relative)
> sd6a:  read restore, block 6736 (6736 relative)
> sd6a:  write retry, block 6736 (6736 relative)
> sd6a:  hard error, block 6736 (6736 relative)
> sd6a error: sense key(0x4) hardware error, error code(0x9): servo error
> sd6:  rezero failed


in various random permutations.  So, I followed the instructions in the
system administration manual for using 'format' to repair a bad block
while the system is up.  I first tried running a surface analysis, but
the read-only test (the only one that will work on a mounted partition)
couldn't find any bad sectors.  So, I decided to just go ahead and repair
block 6736 with the 'repair' command.  This seemed to succeed, and the
sector was added to the defect list.  However, the error messages keep
on coming.  According to the manual, if the repair operation is supported
by the drive and controller, this is all I should need to do: what am I
missing here?  Do I still need to reformat the drive or something?

        - David Hinds
          dhinds@allegro.stanford.edu



From: lrs@hpindda.cup.hp.com (Larry Schwarcz)
Date: Mon, 27 Jul 1992 16:07:41 GMT
Subject: Re: Ethernet address wanted
Organization: HP Information Networks, Cupertino, CA
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sun.admin

Oh, yea,

This was posted on a friends accout, please send all replys
to siu@hpnst.mayfield.hp.com.

       Thanks...

Newsgroups: comp.sys.sun.admin
From: mills@ccu.umanitoba.ca (Gary Mills)
Subject: Re: DNS & Resolver. Things Sun should do.
Keywords: DNS
Organization: University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada
Date: Mon, 27 Jul 1992 13:00:38 GMT

In <jpc.712190285@avdms8.msfc.nasa.gov> jpc@avdms8.msfc.nasa.gov (J. Porter Clark) writes:

>Does this mean that the bug wherein NIS remembers that a DNS lookup
>failed will be fixed?  I'm referring to a longstanding problem in which
>an initial failure of the resolver (perhaps because the response from
>the nameserver arrived too late) will cause the lookup to fail from
>that point on.

I don't see this problem.  After I add a new host to the DNS, I can start
doing ypmatch on that host, and in five or ten minutes it will appear.
I assumed this was due to caching by ypserv, which should be a good thing
because it should reduce traffic between NIS and DNS.
-- 
-Gary Mills-         -Networking Group-          -U of M Computer Services-
From: hanson@pogo.fnal.gov (Steve Hanson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sun.admin
Subject: Re: DNS & Resolver. Things Sun should do.
Keywords: DNS
Date: 24 Jul 92 16:28:08 GMT
Organization: FERMILAB, Batavia, IL

In <1992Jul24.144817.23307@aio.jsc.nasa.gov> nicholls@stillcamera.jsc.nasa.gov (nicholls) writes:


>I wouldn't mind setting up NIS if I knew what the heck it was.
>I recently did a 'grep NIS /usr/man/man?/*' and came up with
>nothing.  If Sun thinks NIS is so great, why isn't it in the manual?


You must have old manuals.  NIS used to be called Yellow Pages.
If you have an old OS release installed on your system you'd
probably have to grep for YP or Yellow Pages.  If you're running
4.0.3 or some such, NIS won't be in there.

By the way - Sun HAS seen the light and all this is much
more configurable in Solaris 2.  Resolving is determined by
a configuration file, much like on a lot of other machines.
-- 
Steve Hanson - FERMILAB, Batavia, Il.  (708)840-8043
hanson@pogo.fnal.gov or hanson@fnal.fnal.gov

Newsgroups: comp.sys.sun.admin
From: duffiem@wl.com (Mark Duffield)
Subject: Re: Sun Screen Savers
Organization: Warner Lambert / Parke-Davis
Date: Thu, 23 Jul 1992 21:12:48 GMT

In article <1992Jul23.160518.20921@eng.ufl.edu> dlopata@shark.stat.ufl.edu (David Lopata) writes:
>...
>
>	The Sun folks have said screenblank should NOT be run in rc.local, and
>should be killed when a person logs out, making it's installation a rather
>pointless gesture at best. 
>

Does Sun say why this is a bad idea?  We do it here and seems to work fine.

-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 Mark J. Duffield          | 
 Parke Davis Biotechnology |   Beer is a beverage, not a projectile.
 (duffiem@wl.com)          |
From: mshah@ece.arizona.edu (Munil A. Shah)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sun.admin
Subject: group stuff..
Date: 21 Jul 92 18:56:10 GMT
Reply-To: mshah@ece.arizona.edu (Munil A. Shah)
Distribution: world,local
Organization: University of Arizona Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering


	We set up a group a long ago. We added and deleted users in that 
group many times. The /etc/group is on the NIS server and rest of the
machines use NIS database. This group doesn't work properly for some of the
members of the group. It works fine for all members when they access files
 on the server, but gives 'permission denied' for some users(The members
who were added to this group lately) on other machines.
	I have run 'make aliases' and other machines can also see these
changes when I do ypcat. But still some users can not access files from
 machines other than server.  BTW the NIS server is also a file server.
	Any hint/help?

Munil
Xref: sparky comp.sys.sun.admin:4892 mail.sun-managers:16
From: tar@math.ksu.edu (Tim Ramsey)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sun.admin
Subject: 4.1.2 sunupgrade: experiences?  advice?  gotchas?
Date: 30 Jul 1992 15:06:30 -0500
Organization: Dept. of Mathematics, Kansas State University
NNTP-Posting-Host: hilbert.math.ksu.edu

I'm on the brink of upgrading diskless and dataless Sun4c's and a
Sun4 server from 4.1.1 to 4.1.2 using sunupgrade.  Are there any
gotchas I should be aware of before I do this?  If you've done this,
how did it go?  Was it painful?  Full of surprises?

If you had to do it over, would you simply do a full OS install?

Thanks for your time.

-- 
    Tim Ramsey, 913.532.6750
    Department of Mathematics
    Kansas State University
From: fpb@ittc.wec.com (Frank P. Bresz)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sun.admin
Subject: Re: resetting pseudo-terminal sizes?
Date: 26 Jul 92 18:02:10 GMT
Organization: Westinghouse, ITTC, Pgh, PA.
In-reply-to: valdes@geosun.uchicago.edu's message of 23 Jul 92 19:25:43 GMT

Distribution: 


In article <1992Jul23.192543.4308@midway.uchicago.edu> valdes@geosun.uchicago.edu (John Valdes) writes:


=>OK, I just tried to reproduce the results under OW 2.0 and 3.0, but it
=>didn't show up in with either version (SunOS 4.1.1, BTW).  I guess I 
=>was a bit rash including OW; I remember having the problem under Sunview,
=>and I'm currently experiencing it under X (from MIT, X11R4), so I assumed
=>the problem was present under OW also.

=>I have been able to reliable reproduce the results under X and Sunview,
=>but only under certain circumstances.  Here's what I do:

=>1)  Start up X or sunview

=>2)  In addition to whatever xterms or cmdtools (or shelltools) opened
=>    when you started X or sunview, respectively, open two more.  For
=>    example, say that you started X with two xterms which use /dev/ttyp0
=>    and /dev/ttyp1.  You want to open two more xterms so that they
=>    use ttyp2 and ttyp3.

=>3)  Resize the first of the two windows you opened in 1) (the xterm
=>    using ttyp2 in the example above).  stty -a should reflect the new size.

=>4)  Exit the window which you just resized (ttyp2)

=>5)  From any of the other windows (or from another machine), telnet
=>    into the machine so that your login uses the same ttyp used by
=>    the window you just resized and quit (ttyp2, in this example).

=>6)  If you now type stty -a, the number of rows and columns reported
=>    will match the size of the window you had just resized and quit.

=>Observations:

=>  Assume ttyp(n) is the ttyp which has be resized for the following:

=>  -I see this behavior only if ttyp(n+1) is in use.  For example, say
=>   ttyp0, ttyp1, ttyp2, ttyp3 and ttyp4 are in use.  This behavior
=>   won't be seen if ttyp4 is the one resized.  It will happen if ttyp2
=>   is the one resized.  ttyp(n-1) may also have to be in use, but I
=>   haven't tested this in all cases.  (Hey, I've got work to do!! (-: )

=>  -It seems that this only happens with even numbered ttyp's, but again
=>   I haven't tested this extensively.

	Hmm, 
	I have a 4/490 running SunOS 4.1.1 which is forever getting what I
	call 'whacked out ptys'.  Seems to always be even numbered ptys.
	Typically 0 but sometimes 6.  Sometimes you can't even login on the
	telnet port.  After entering your password it just says 'connection
	closed'.  Other times the terminal is in noecho mode.  Other times
	it is in the mode where you get no <CR> just linefeeds across your
	page.  If anyone knows of a patch I'd really like to hear about it.

	Email please I don't get to gnus as often as I'd like.
--
Frank P. Bresz  |My opinions are mine, WEC pays big money for official opinions
fpb@ittc.wec.com|Use Sun Type 3 keyboards, they hurt more when used as a weapon
uunet!ittc!fpb  |Member: League for Programming Freedom (LPF) | STOP Software |
+1 412 733 6749 |For more information on the 'LPF' send mail  |  Patents Now  |