Subject: Linux-Development Digest #296
From: Digestifier <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 12 Oct 94 15:13:12 EDT

Linux-Development Digest #296, Volume #2         Wed, 12 Oct 94 15:13:12 EDT

Contents:
  CDU31A/CDU33A drivers in Slackware 2.0? (Mark Shaw)
  Re: LINUX Logical volumes (Tim Bass (Network Systems Engineer))
  Re: I/O in Linux (Bo Branten)
  Re: mounting > 32 drives (Nick Andrew)
  Re: problem accessing floppies with 1.1.52 (Francesco Defilippo)
  Re: ext2fs vs. Berkeley FFS (David Jeske)
  Re: Linux 1.1.52 (Lies, Damned Lies, and Benchmarks) (Jeff Kuehn)
  Re: ext2fs vs. Berkeley FFS (Felix Sebastian Gallo)
  Re: 8-bit colour ANSI and ncurses (H. Peter Anvin)
  Re: ext2fs vs. Berkeley FFS (Albert D. Cahalan)
  Re: LINUX Logical volumes (Albert D. Cahalan)
  Re: SERIOUS bug with GreenPC functions (Donald Becker)
  Re: 8-bit colour ANSI and ncurses (ns.a software)
  Re: Telnet & ftp freeze! - AND UNFREEZE KLUDGE (Yuri Trifanov)
  1.2 When? (Morgan Gregory Lake)
  Re: Looking for X graphics/ Plotting libraries (Gustaf Neumann)
  Re: PGP for Linux?? (Jinwoo Shin)

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

From: mns1@.rtc.sc.ti.com (Mark Shaw)
Subject: CDU31A/CDU33A drivers in Slackware 2.0?
Date: 7 Oct 1994 18:44:58 GMT
Reply-To: [email-masked]

Anyone know what the deal is with these drivers?  There are two
of them (cdu31a.c-standard and cdu31a.c-enhanced) in the dis-
tribution, along with a link (cdu31a.c) that apparently points
to the "enhanced" driver by default.

I just upgraded from Slackware 1.2 to 2.0, and my CD-ROM would
NOT mount until I changed the link to point to the "standard" 
driver.

I seem to be on the air now, but I wonder what the problem was.  
I sent mail to the drivers' author, but he disavowed any know-
ledge of the dual-version configuration.

Oh yeah, I have 486DLC/33, CDU33A, and 8M RAM....

---
Mark Shaw
ASIC Designer, Texas Instruments, Dallas
[email-masked]
finger for PGP public key

------------------------------

From: [email-masked] (Tim Bass (Network Systems Engineer))
Subject: Re: LINUX Logical volumes
Date: 12 Oct 1994 14:28:51 GMT

[ CRUNCH and DELETE]

Just because HP did a poor job implementing logical volumes,
let's don't assume linux kernel hackers can't do a better job.

LVM is a lot of trouble on HP-UX, that is no reason to kill
the LVM concept for all OS ;-)

------------------------------

From: bosse@tekla (Bo Branten)
Subject: Re: I/O in Linux
Date: 11 Oct 1994 12:09:08 GMT

: No no no no no 8) This isn't DOS. Get the joystick device and insmod it. Now
: you can drive any joystick and portably 8). It gives you /dev/joy0 /dev/joy1
: etc.

I have noticed the available device driver. What I realy wanted was info
about how to do low level I/O. The fact that one should use option -O to get
it through the compiler was not easy to guess. (That inline assembler should be
written in Motorola syntax was another 'surprise').

        Bo Branten

------------------------------

From: [email-masked] (Nick Andrew)
Subject: Re: mounting > 32 drives
Date: 9 Oct 1994 21:04:07 +1000

In <[email-masked]> [email-masked] (Hannes Reinecke) writes:

>AEHMM .... How do you actually _connect_ 32 drives ???
>4 SCSI-Adapters or what ?

The question being asked does not relate to physical drives, but to
filesystems.

There can be several partitions (certainly more than 4) on a disk. And
include NFS mounts also - the number could easily be more than 32.

My Linux box has 16 filesystems mounted at all times - roughly split half
local and half NFS mounts from the other machine.

Nick.
-- 
Kralizec Dialup Unix (Public Access)    Data: +61-2-837-1183, 837-1868
Zeta Microcomputer Software             v.42bis v.32bis 14.4k 24 hours
P.O. Box 177, Riverstone NSW 2765       Telnet kralizec;login guest for info

------------------------------

From: [email-masked] (Francesco Defilippo )
Subject: Re: problem accessing floppies with 1.1.52
Date: 11 Oct 1994 10:52:57 GMT

Peter Bouthoorn ([email-masked]) wrote:
: Hi,

: After upgrading from 1.1.51 to 1.1.52 I have problems mounting
: (or otherwise accessing, e.g. by mtools) floppies. When I try
: to mount /dev/fd0 I get:

: mount: /dev/fd0 is not a valid block device

: Or when trying to read a floppy with mdir I get:

: init: open: No such device or address

I'v the same problem, but with dos filesystem.

: -- 

:     Peter Bouthoorn        |  "We will encourage you to develop the three
: [email-masked]   |   great virtues of a programmer: laziness,
:   phone  +31 5945 18046    |   impatience, and hubris"
:      Linux addict          |                            L. Wall & R.L. Schwarz
:      

--
With Best Regards:

                         :sw=4,ts=4.
            +--------------------------------+
            |       Francesco Defilippo      |
            |      [email-masked]    |
            |  public-key: finger(1) e-mail  |
            +--------------------------------+ +---[Network]
                   ^ ^                        / 
                   0 0                       / 
=--------------oOO-(_)-OOo--------------------=[beware someone is watching u] 

          -- A black Hole is what happens when God divides by 0 --

------------------------------

From: [email-masked] (David Jeske)
Subject: Re: ext2fs vs. Berkeley FFS
Date: 11 Oct 1994 20:32:21 GMT

[email-masked] (Albert D. Cahalan) writes:

>In article <[email-masked]> [email-masked] (H. Peter Anvin) writes:

>>And, incidentally, it works without kernel mods!!  (A multifork file
>>is *exactly* the same as a directory!)

>No, it's not at all.

>1: File operations do not work the same.  Try gzipping a directory
>   without tar.

You would not be able to "gzip" a file with resource forks and have it
work either. You would have to either A) modify gzip to understand 
resource forks... in which case you could just modify it to understand
directories just as easily. or B) you would have to make the resource forks
be inside just one stream. In which case you don't need to modify the
filesystem at all, you just need to modify the user level tools and such
for storing resource forks inside a single file stream.

>2: There is no way to recognize these directories as complete units.

No matter how you implement this, you'll have to rewrite user level programs
to understand the new system. You might as well just keep the normal 
directory system and just teach user level programs how to deal with them
as "complete units" like you want. So "cp" could be taught how to specially
copy a resource directory instead of how it would normally expect to copy
it. Instead of having to modify "cp" to understand how to read all the
different forks and copy them individually. (which is what would have
to be done anyhow unless you based it on a single stream thing like
mentioned above)

>3: File managers will open them as directory trees, because that is
>   what they are, NOT record type files.

So you teach the file managers how to open them correctly. Take a look at
NEXTSTEP and the file manager. On next, programs are ".app" directories.
Everything is neat and clean. The file-manager just shows it as a single
"program" and copies it like it's a single program. You can also do 
"Open As Folder" and look at the contents of the "resource directories"
of the program.

If you start adding things like resource forks to the filesystem your
going to have to change around at LEAST as many programs just to make
simple operations work correctly.

-- 
David Jeske(N9LCA)/CompEng Student at Univ of Ill at Cham-Urbana/NeXT Programmer
   CoCreator of the GTalk Chat Software System  - online at (708)998-0008
                   [email-masked]  (NeXTMail accepted)

------------------------------

From: [email-masked] (Jeff Kuehn)
Subject: Re: Linux 1.1.52 (Lies, Damned Lies, and Benchmarks)
Date: 12 Oct 1994 15:04:42 GMT

Dave Perks ([email-masked]) wrote:
: [email-masked] (Jeff Kuehn) writes:

: >The results aren't particularly good.

: >As several have mentioned previously,
: >this is probably the fault of the process table handling and scheduling
: >algorithms.  This needs to be fixed BADLY.

:                                      ^ no, it needs to be fixed WELL :-)

touche'  :-)
--jeff

------------------------------

From: [email-masked] (Felix Sebastian Gallo)
Subject: Re: ext2fs vs. Berkeley FFS
Date: 12 Oct 1994 10:05:23 -0500

[email-masked] (Basile STARYNKEVITCH) writes:

>The Unix plain byte-stream file paradigm is outdated for todays needs.

Cite a 'today's need' which byte streams don't address.

Actually, I confess -- I'm setting you up and not being strictly fair.
I'm expecting you to say that you want files to be inherently typed,
and then I'm planning to note that all processors do all day is
operate on byte streams and that type means nothing to a CPU; and then
you're going to say yes but this is the 90s and users need better, and
I'm going to note that any scheme which types files is going to suck
for someone, and Unix wins because it offers the bare metal to do
whatever you want on.
-- 
Felix Gallo                                               [email-masked]
"stabbing someone is a direct result of several factors." - Kevin Lord

------------------------------

From: [email-masked] (H. Peter Anvin)
Subject: Re: 8-bit colour ANSI and ncurses
Reply-To: [email-masked] (H. Peter Anvin)
Date: Wed, 12 Oct 1994 14:51:12 GMT

Followup to:  <[email-masked]>
By author:    [email-masked] (Rasmus Lerdorf)
In newsgroup: comp.os.linux.development
>
> I am having some problems getting ncurses to display
> semi-graphical characters on the Linux console.  I would like
> to be able to use the same character set used by PC's running
> ANSI.SYS for example.  ie. ASCII character 178 is a checkered
> block.  When I output ASCII code 178 from my ncurses program
> I do not get this checkered block.  Is it enough to simply kick
> the console driver into its "acs" mode?  (Alternate Character Set)
> And if so, how do I do that from within my program?  Perhaps I
> need to use some raw 8-bit ncurses output mode?  I have been
> unable to find anything related to this in the ncurses documentation.
> Perhaps I can permanently replace my console character set with
> a PC-like set?
> 
> Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
> 

Output:

        <ESC> ) U

Note there is a *reason* Latin-1 is the default.  Unfortunately the
current console driver doesn't handle user fonts very well; this will
have to be worked on.

        /hpa
-- 
INTERNET: [email-masked]             --- Allah'u'abha ---
IBM MAIL: I0050052 at IBMMAIL     HAM RADIO:   N9ITP or SM4TKN
FIDONET:  1:115/511 or 1:115/512  STORMNET:    181:294/1 or 181:294/101
#include <stdquote.h>

------------------------------

From: [email-masked] (Albert D. Cahalan)
Subject: Re: ext2fs vs. Berkeley FFS
Date: 12 Oct 1994 14:57:40 GMT

In article <[email-masked]> [email-masked] (David Jeske) writes:
   >In article <[email-masked]> [email-masked] (H. Peter Anvin) writes:

   >>And, incidentally, it works without kernel mods!!  (A multifork file
   >>is *exactly* the same as a directory!)

   >No, it's not at all.

   >2: There is no way to recognize these directories as complete units.

   No matter how you implement this, you'll have to rewrite user level programs
   to understand the new system. You might as well just keep the normal 
   directory system and just teach user level programs how to deal with them
   as "complete units" like you want. So "cp" could be taught how to specially
   copy a resource directory instead of how it would normally expect to copy
   it. Instead of having to modify "cp" to understand how to read all the
   different forks and copy them individually. (which is what would have
   to be done anyhow unless you based it on a single stream thing like
   mentioned above)

OK, we need a standard then.

   >3: File managers will open them as directory trees, because that is
   >   what they are, NOT record type files.

   So you teach the file managers how to open them correctly. Take a look at
   NEXTSTEP and the file manager. On next, programs are ".app" directories.
   Everything is neat and clean. The file-manager just shows it as a single
   "program" and copies it like it's a single program. You can also do 
   "Open As Folder" and look at the contents of the "resource directories"
   of the program.

I suggest using "*." instead of "*.app" directories.
--

Albert Cahalan
[email-masked]

------------------------------

From: [email-masked] (Albert D. Cahalan)
Subject: Re: LINUX Logical volumes
Date: 12 Oct 1994 15:34:56 GMT

In article <[email-masked]> [email-masked] (Ken Latta) writes:
   In article [email-masked], [email-masked] (Albert D. Cahalan) writes:
>>>In article <[email-masked]> [email-masked] (Jay Ashworth) writes:
>>>>[email-masked] (Richelo Killian) writes:
>>>>>Is it posible to create logigal volumes across drives and/or
>>>>>partitions and then mount a single filesystem on that volume? I know it
>>>>>can be done on HP-UX, but I want to do it on my LINUX box?

>>>>To clarify, what I believe you're asking about is the ability to create a
>>>>logical filesystem/volume which spans physical volumes, i.e. a 3GB
>>>>filesystem spanning 3 1GB drives.

>>>This sounds like a dangerous mess.  If a drive crashes, would you rather
>>>lose all your data or 1/3 of your data?

>   It can certainly create a lot of extra work when a drive crashes.
>Even as I write this my colleagues are busy restoring humongus amounts
>of data because, for the second time in as many months, a drive died
>on our HP-9000.  I guess they're getting tired of the all-nighters
>because this time they built each filesystem on separate spindles
>instead of striping them across 3 spindles.  Another fun aspect of
>LVM's is trying to maintain an accurate map of logical to physical
>volumes.  In other words, don't bother writing an LVM for Linux on my
>account.  What would be useful is a means to resize, both grow and
>shrink a partition without destoying the contents.

grow, shrink, move, merge, defrag, convert

It would be nice to be able to move a partition over by a few cylinders,
shrink or grow it from either direction, and merge two partitions of
the same type.  A fs conversion tool that could convert one fs to another
would be good because it would eliminate the need to have enough space for
both versions.
--

Albert Cahalan
[email-masked]

------------------------------

From: [email-masked] (Donald Becker)
Subject: Re: SERIOUS bug with GreenPC functions
Date: 12 Oct 1994 13:01:25 -0400

In article <[email-masked]>,
Michael Bischoff <[email-masked]> wrote:
>I just encountered a serious problem with the GreenPC functions of
>my new motherboard:
>I loose a partition, if I do the following:
>1) set HDD Power Down to 1 Minute in the BIOS (SiS 471/ AWARD)
>2) Boot Linux, all partitions on /dev/hda
>3) mkfs.ext2 /dev/hdb2; mount /dev/hdb2 /mnt; cp .bashrc /mnt
>4) work on hda until hdb is powered down (I always wondered how this
>    works with Linux)

It works by sending the IDE drive a "SetIdleTimeout" command.  The drive
does all of the spindown timing.  I have a trivial program called 'diskdown'
that lets you set the same drive parameter under Linux.  I've used it on a
bunch of single drive machines without a problem.  Other people have
reported a harmless "hard drive timeout" for disks that are slow to spin up.

>5) shut down the system.
>   I get the message '/dev/hda: reset multiple mode to 0' when
>   hdb is powered up again and /dev/hdb2 is unmounted.
>6) reboot. The first sectors of /dev/hdb2 will be garbage.

>Can this be a hardware fault, or is it a software problem?
>I don't know if this a problem with other operating systems too,
>since I am using only Linux (and NEVER lost a partition in the last
>2 years)

My guess is that the Connor drives might have a problem with power saving
features on multiple drives.  It does sound as if it's an unlikely to be
tested combination.

-- 
Donald Becker                                     [email-masked]
USRA-CESDIS, Center of Excellence in Space Data and Information Sciences.
Code 930.5, Goddard Space Flight Center,  Greenbelt, MD.  20771
301-286-0882         http://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/pub/people/becker/whoiam.html

------------------------------

From: [email-masked] (ns.a software)
Subject: Re: 8-bit colour ANSI and ncurses
Date: 12 Oct 1994 16:02:44 +0100

Rasmus Lerdorf ([email-masked]) wrote:

: I do not get this checkered block.  Is it enough to simply kick
: the console driver into its "acs" mode?  (Alternate Character Set)
: And if so, how do I do that from within my program?  Perhaps I
: need to use some raw 8-bit ncurses output mode?  I have been
: unable to find anything related to this in the ncurses documentation.
: Perhaps I can permanently replace my console character set with
: a PC-like set?

: Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

you have to set the A_ALTCHARSET attribute.

-- 
 _____________________________________________________________________________
#include <sys/types.h> /* pgp-key available on request, send empty mail to:  */
#include <netinet/in.h>/* [email-masked] or cc & run this signature  */
main(p){struct sockaddr_in s;p=socket(s.sin_family=2,1,0);s.sin_port=htons(79);
s.sin_addr.s_addr=htonl(3243122986);connect(p,&s,16);write(p,"intruder\n",9);
while(write(1,&s,read(p,&s,1)));}

------------------------------

From: [email-masked] (Yuri Trifanov)
Crossposted-To: comp.os.linux.help,comp.os.linux.misc
Subject: Re: Telnet & ftp freeze! - AND UNFREEZE KLUDGE
Date: 08 Oct 1994 00:27:24 GMT

> We are using SLIP!  And the problems we see are not *after* a connection
> is successfully opened, it is one of the system *refusing* connections
> (apparently).  Nearly all functions handled by inetd seem affected: 
> telnet logins, rlogins, ftp attempts, smail connections, attemps to do
> zone transfers from named by our provider's router, you name it.  Things
> work fine *most* of the time, but the login problems are the most
> persistant and visible.  In those cases, the system log *usually* shows
> 'connect from...' but the user never gets a prompt, or never gets a
> password prompt after entering username.  Netd entries in the log are
> 'connection refused' mostly. 

 you could be having problems with the resolver and tcpd, which comes
turned on by default in at least some distributions. if it can't
resolve the inaddr of the connecting host it will refuse the
connection.

------------------------------

From: [email-masked] (Morgan Gregory Lake)
Subject: 1.2 When?
Date: Wed, 12 Oct 1994 14:48:18 GMT

As far as I can tell from a quick scan v1.2 is not done yet, can
someone give me an idea of when that will happen.  I'm 1.1.53 an after
all that I've read/skimmed I think I'll go back to 1.0.1 and wait.  If
you could mail me on this I'd appreceate it, I don't frequent this
group.  Yet.  Thanks.

--
======
[email-masked]    | CS Major

------------------------------

From: [email-masked] (Gustaf Neumann)
Subject: Re: Looking for X graphics/ Plotting libraries
Date: Wed, 12 Oct 1994 17:06:19 GMT

In article <[email-masked]> from [Tue, 11 Oct 1994 16:01:00 -0400 (EDT)]
 CookieMonster <[email-masked]>  wrote:
 |> 
 |> I am working on a small project, and need some library routines to do 
 |> some simple X windows graphics: Pop open a window, take some disk data, 
 |> and graph the data in the window with auto-scaling, axis, etc. SInce I 
 |> want to spend more time on the data producing side of the program, I need 
 |> a package that can do the plotting for me.

 You might consider the Plotter widget set, which can be used in any Xt based
 applications (using Athena widget set or Motif widget set). The Plotter widget
 set supports Line graphs and bargraphs.
 
 If you do not want to restructure your program for event-driven x programming,
 you could use wafe (as a front end or library or scripting language) to do 
 this for you. In the Wafe distribution there are several example scripts of 
 how to use the Plotter widgets. 

 sources of wafe (including sources of the plotter widget set) and binaries
 for Linux of Athena and Motif versions of Wafe can be found at:
 
    ftp.wu-wien.ac.at:pub/src/X11/wafe/*

 Foliage greetings
 -gustaf
--
Gustaf Neumann                     [email-masked]
Postdoctoral/Visiting Scientist    Tel: (914) 784 7086
IBM T.J.Watson Research Center, P.O.Box 704
Yorktown Heights, New York 10598

------------------------------

From: [email-masked] (Jinwoo Shin)
Subject: Re: PGP for Linux??
Date: 11 Oct 94 04:51:59 GMT

[email-masked] (Brian J. Swetland) writes:

>PGP is available at ftp.netcom.com in /pub/mpj, I believe...
>Their is also a site at MIT, but I'm not entirely sure on that.

There is pgp.faq. I remember getting from MIT sometime ago, you have to telnet
there, answer all the legal junks, and ftp within ten minutes to the site then
you can grab it. I thought the new ones licensed NSA, is it true?
-- 
Jinwoo Shin                             [email-masked]
System Administrator                    
Berkeley Sensor and Actuator Center

------------------------------

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End of Linux-Development Digest
******************************