TUHS November 2019

tuhs@tuhs.org

77 participants
41 discussions

by norman＠nose.cita.utoronto.ca

I've assembled some notes from old manuals and other sources on the formats used for on-disk file systems through the Seventh Edition: http://www.cita.utoronto.ca/~norman/old-unix/old-fs.html Additional notes, comments on style, and whatnot are welcome. (It may be sensible to send anything in the last two categories directly to me, rather than to the whole list.)

2 years, 8 months

Looking for Maitre'd tarball

by Ron Young

Hi All: I looking for the source code to the Maitre'd load balancer. It is used to run jobs on lightly used machines. It was developed by Brian Berhard at Berkeley's Computer Systems Support Group. I have the technical report for it (dated 17-dec-1985). But haven't run across the tarball. thanks -ron

5 years

another conversion of the CSRG BSD SCCS archives to Git

by Greg A. Woods

I've been fixing and enhancing James Youngman's git-sccsimport to use with some of my SCCS archives, and I thought it might be the ultimate stress test of it to convert the CSRG BSD SCCS archives. The conversion takes about an hour to run on my old-ish Dell server. This conversion is unlike others -- there is some mechanical compression of related deltas into a single Git commit. https://github.com/robohack/ucb-csrg-bsd https://github.com/robohack/git-sccsimport -- Greg A. Woods <gwoods(a)acm.org> Kelowna, BC +1 250 762-7675 RoboHack <woods(a)robohack.ca> Planix, Inc. <woods(a)planix.com> Avoncote Farms <woods(a)avoncote.ca>

5 years, 1 month

In Memoriam: J.F.Ossanna

by Dave Horsfall

We lost J.F. Ossanna on this day in 1977; he had a hand in developing Unix, and was responsible for "roff" and its descendants. Remember him, the next time you see "jfo" in Unix documentation. He also accomplished a lot more, too much to summarise here. -- Dave

5 years, 1 month

Someone wants to use an exabyte

by Richard Salz

Historically important he says. The guy had creds. https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/1198706617967095809?s=19

5 years, 1 month

FreeBSD retires gets()!

by Norman Wilson

We retired gets from Research UNIX back in 1984 or perhaps earlier, with no serious pain because replacing it wasn't hard and everybody agreed with the reason. I'm glad to hear some part of the rest of the world is catching up. We also decided to retire the old Enigma-derived crypt(1), except we didn't want to throw it out entirely in case someone had an old encrypted file and wanted the contents back. So it was removed from the manual and the binary moved to /usr/games. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

5 years, 2 months

FreeBSD retires gets()!

by Dave Horsfall

Seen in the FreeBSD Quarterly Report: gets(3) retirement Contact: Ed Maste <emaste(a)FreeBSD.org> gets is an obsolete C library routine for reading a string from standard input. It was removed from the C standard as of C11 because there was no way to use it safely. Prompted by a comment during Paul Vixie's talk at vBSDCon 2017 I started investigating what it would take to remove gets from libc. The patch was posted to Phabricator and refined several times, and the portmgr team performed several exp-runs to identify ports broken by the removal. Symbol versioning is used to preserve binary compatibility for existing software that uses gets. The change was committed in September, and will be in FreeBSD 13.0. This project was sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation. And the world is a slightly safer place... -- Dave

5 years, 2 months

Irix on MIPS -- was kernel mode paged

by ron minnich

I'm looking for a reference to any Unix ports where the kernel ran in a non-paged address space and user mode was paged. I could swear this was done at some point, and memory says it was on a soft-TLB system like the MIPS, to avoid TLB pollution and TLB fault overhead. But maybe I'm nuts. I am happy to hear either answer.

5 years, 2 months

Re: [TUHS] Someone wants to use an exabyte [ really bulk erasing ]

by Norman Wilson

I had a hand-held degausser, but lent it to someone years ago and never got it back. It was actually Exabyte that made me buy it. I bought a new 8505 through a reseller to supersede the 8200 I was using for home backups. It turned out the 8505's firmware refused to overwrite a tape already written at any but the highest density, so I couldn't reuse any of my existing backup tapes. Exabyte insisted it was a feature, not a bug. So I gave up and bought a degausser so I could turn a used tape into a blank tape so the damn tape drive would write on it. For further vintage-computing amusement: I decided to buy at that time because the reseller had arranged a deal with Exabyte: trade in any old tape drive, working or not, and get a couple of hundred bucks off on a brand-new 8505. So I gave the reseller an old, broken TK05 I had lying around. My sales contact for the reseller was a former service tech at the same company, so I figured (correctly) he'd get the joke. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

5 years, 2 months

Re: [TUHS] Someone wants to use an exabyte

by Norman Wilson

Snotty remarks aside, I have a couple of Exabyte drives in my home world. They haven't been used for a long time, but when they were (for some years I used them as a regular backup device) they worked just fine. I've pinged the guy. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

5 years, 2 months

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TUHS November 2019