Newsgroups: comp.unix.sysv386
Subject: Re: Dell SVR4 and Postscript ANSWER (from the NET of course)
From: karl@ttank.ttank.com (Karl Bunch)
Date: Fri, 24 Jul 1992 05:13:53 GMT
Distribution: na
Organization: Think Tank Software, Norwalk, CA

In <1992Jul23.161440.19562@holos0.uucp> fsg@holos0.uucp (Frank Glass) writes:

>Two questions:

>1.  Why didn't you expect the answer to come from HP rather than Dell?
>It seems that if you purchase pieces from two different sources you should
>expect to have difficulty with interface problems with possibly nowhere to
>turn.  As has been pointed out, this is what VARS and dealers are for.

HP would have not even had the faintest guess.  I would be supprised
if the Unix support group couldn't have helped in this situation.  I for
one got a very quick reply when I described the problem in email to
support@dell.com.  They basicly said "maybe next release it'll be fixed".
So I surrendered and worked around it.

One VERY basic difference between me and a lot of people is I will
spend a great deal of time thinking it's something wrong with MY
end of the set-up.  And as such I just took the whole problem apart
until I found the "smallest" part.  And that was postio!

>2.  Where _is_ the behavior of postio and related programs documented?
>In our $1000 or so worth of SYSV documentation from NCR, AT&T and others
>I haven't found documentation.  I ended up writing code from scratch to
>get a postscript printer to run across a network using a named pipe to
>capture the output of postio.  A real kludge born of lack of documentation.

UNIX SYSTEM V RELEASE 4
User's Reference Manual
ISBN 0-13-947037-9
postio(1)

Granted this is only a few "man" pages.  But, I know entire re-writes
of programs have been done with less. ;-)

BTW someone suggested using the -q option to stop "asking" for
status messages from the printer.  I tried this and as far as I can
tell postio ALWAYS asks for a status before sending the Job.  So it
would just loop.

Also, please don't underestimate the usefulness of truss(1).  This was
very helpful in figuring out what postio was doing.  Not to mention I
binary patched getty to reset in 10 seconds on a bi-directional line
instead of the default 60.  And there was the patch to mousemgr to
ignore the return of the ioctl(fd, TCMOUSE, 1) so I could use my
mouse on a Digiboard 16/Xi port instead of the sio driven Com1 port.
And a change to libc.so.1 so that ttyname would work as advertised in
the manual (use /etc/ttysrch etc.) etc. etc....

All the problems I've had with Dell unix have been graciously responed
to by support@dell.com even after more than 6 months after I purchased
the system.

It's important to make the whole situation a "team" event.  Be helpful
as much as you ask for help.  If you have 10 years of Unix experiance
spell everything out to the n-th detail so the other people understand
the entire picture.  STOP WORKING FROM US -VS- THEM.  Or else, you'll
get angry people wanting to find a way to PIN THE BLAME on you.

Good Luck,
Karl

BTW if there is sufficient interest I'll post my kpostio program
that I used to fix this situation.  It's written in perl, and I'll
have to clean it up a bit. ;-)
-- 
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Newsgroups: comp.unix.sysv386