Are there any former Bell Labs sysadmins on this list? My father was the
sysadmin for hoh* (Crawford Hill, mostly the radio astronomy folks) in the
mid-late '80s and early '90s and I would be especially interested to hear
from hou* (Holmdel, what a building!) folks but also ihn* (Indian Hill) and
the like. I'm very curious about what life was like on the ground, so to
speak.
I'll start off with a quick anecdote. When I started college I began
working for the computing center doing menial jobs. There was an older,
ex-army guy leading the networking department who extolled the virtues of
the VAX up and down; I think Oberlin would have kept the VAX 6620 running
VMS 5.5 forever if he had his way. Anyway, I mentioned his position to my
father and he told me that the best thing he ever did was replace the VAX
systems (and the endless mounting/remounting of RL02s for user data) with
early generation Sun 4 systems.
-Henry
Coming upon this dedication in W.B. Yeats's book, "Irish Folk
stories and Fairy Tales", I felt a frisson of connection: "Inscribed
to my mystical friend, G. R." Mystically present in the Unix room
and on the 1127 org chart, G. R. Emlin took a place in our little
community akin to that of fairies in Irish peasant culture. First
encountered by Fred Grampp, G. R. manifested to others in various
guises, ranging from Grace Emlin, whom I remember as a security guru,
to a Labs-badged apparition now housed in the corporate archives
(www.peteradamsphoto.com/unix-folklore/) My most memorable personal
encounter was when I received from G. R. a receipt for paint for the
water-tower project (spinrooot.com/pico/pjw.html) as part of a request
for reimbursement. I passed the voucher up the chain of command to
our executive director, Vic Vyssotsky. Unfortunately for G. R., Vic,
despite his masterful ability to bypass bureaucratic obstacles,
declared he wasn't authorized to approve plant improvements.
Doug
Hi All,
I'm currently doing some work with 211BSD and the best version that I've
come across for my investigations is the one put together by Andre
Luvisi, based on the distro in the Unix Archive at
https://tuhs.v6shell.org/UnixArchiveMirror/Distributions/UCB/2.11BSD
So far as I can figure out (and I'm a little bit fuzzy around the
edges), this appears to be patch level 431, at least according to
https://tuhs.v6shell.org/UnixArchiveMirror/Distributions/UCB/2.11BSD/VERSION.
I have a number of questions that hopefully, someone can shed some light on:
1. Is it really pl 431?
2. How can I tell?
3. Is it the latest tape image available (I've seen plenty of disk
images, but those are already installed)?
4. Is there a howto bring it up to the next patch level document lying
around somewhere?
I've seen Warner's work on going the other direction and that's
fascinating in it's own right, but I'd like to see about patching up to
latest.
Thanks,
Will
--
GPG Fingerprint: 68F4 B3BD 1730 555A 4462 7D45 3EAA 5B6D A982 BAAF
Well, I figured out number 4, duh!
4. Is there a howto bring it up to the next patch level document lying
around somewhere?
Each patch is self documenting :). Just do what it says and it should
work... we'll see!
Will
--
GPG Fingerprint: 68F4 B3BD 1730 555A 4462 7D45 3EAA 5B6D A982 BAAF
On 7/19/20, emanuel stiebler <emu(a)e-bbes.com> wrote:
>
> That's why DEC made also the MicroVAX. I had once a MVII/BA23 in my
> samsonite. Weird look at customs, but worked ;-)
>
By the early 1980s it was apparent that some of the more complicated
VAX instructions weren't worth the space they took up in firmware.
Especially POLY and EMOD, which turned out to be both slower and less
accurate than coding them up as subroutines. And the PL/I and COBOL
compilers were implementing packed decimal using decimal shadowing.
Chucking out those instructions and doing them by emulation in the OS
freed up enough chip real estate to allow the remaining VAX
architecture to be implemented on a chip. All the later VAXen
supported only the MicroVAX subset architecture in hardware/firmware.
I don't recall which was the last VAX to support the whole
architecture in hardware/firmware. Perhaps the VAX 8200/8300
(Scorpio)? That was a single-board implementation. It could be
paired with a high-end Evans & Sutherland 3D graphics monitor. DEC
tried unsuccessfully to use that combination to compete with Apollo in
the workstation market, but it was too little too late. One reviewer
said that coupling the E&S graphics to the VAX 8200 was like
turbocharging a lawn mower. Did Unix support that configuration, or
was it VMS-only?
-Paul W.
IMMSMC the early Linux had problems with some old-good programs i.e. Sendmail.
New-born Linux hesitated between POSIX-BSD-Solaris semantic
i.e. in file-locking, pty, network interface binding e.t.c.
>From the early Sendmail README:
===
Linux
Something broke between versions 0.99.13 and 0.99.14 of Linux:
the flock() system call gives errors. If you are running .14,
you must not use flock. You can do this with -DHASFLOCK=0.
Around the inclusion of bind-4.9.3 & linux libc-4.6.20, the
initialization of the _res structure changed. If /etc/hosts.conf
was configured as "hosts, bind" the resolver code could return
"Name server failure" errors. This is supposedly fixed in
later versions of libc (>= 4.6.29?), and later versions of
sendmail (> 8.6.10) try to work around the problem.
Some older versions (< 4.6.20?) of the libc/include files conflict
with sendmail's version of cdefs.h. Deleting sendmail's version
on those systems should be non-harmful, and new versions don't care.
Sendmail assumes that libc has snprintf, which has been true since
libc 4.7.0. If you are running an older version, you will need to
use -DHASSNPRINTF=0 in the Makefile. If may be able to use -lbsd
(which includes snprintf) instead of turning this off on versions
of libc between 4.4.4 and 4.7.0 (snprintf improves security, so
you want to use this if at all possible).
NOTE ON LINUX & BIND: By default, the Makefiles for linux include
header files in /usr/local/include and libraries in /usr/local/lib.
If you've installed BIND on your system, the header files typically
end up in the search path and you need to add "-lresolv" to the
LIBS line in your Makefile. Really old versions may need to include
"-l44bsd" as well (particularly if the link phase complains about
missing strcasecmp, strncasecmp or strpbrk). Complaints about an
undefined reference to `__dn_skipname' in domain.o are a sure sign
that you need to add -lresolv to LIBS. Newer versions of linux
are basically threaded BIND, so you may or may not see complaints
if you accidentally mix BIND headers/libraries with virginal libc.
If you have BIND headers in /usr/local/include (resolv.h, etc)
you *should* be adding -lresolv to LIBS. Data structures may change
and you'd be asking for a core dump.
I've managed to reach an important milestone in my efforts to recreate
2.11BSD pl 0 from sources. I've managed to unwind the patches, recreated
some programs that were lost (the patches destroyed data and weren't modern
context diffs).
So I've managed to unwind back to pl 0, I've managed to bootstrap the
assembler (it wouldn't build on pl 195), recreate ld, ranlib and ar. I've
rebuilt the libraries and many binaries.
https://bsdimp.blogspot.com/2020/07/211bsd-original-tapes-recreation.html
No tapes yet, but I thought people here would like to know.
Warner
(if this is better suited for COFF, that'd be fine too)
I've been trying to set up UUCP on my V7 system and its raspberry Pi host.
This plus the "s" editor (already working) are really all that's needed to
make this something pretty close to a daily driver, if all I wanted to do
was write text files (which in some sense is all my job _is_, but to be
fair I get a much more immediate feedback loop in my current environment).
I was following
https://github.com/jwbrase/pdp11-tools/blob/master/howtos/V7%20UUCP%20Insta…
more or less--I had already rebuilt v7 with the DZ terminal driver and was
using it for interactive sessions (albeit, before I started trying to get
UUCP running, with 7-bit line discipline--but I've since changed that).
I have 16 DZ lines, I've set them to 8-bit mode. They're working fine,
because I can use them for terminal sessions.
I've built UUCP, set a node name, and set it up on the pi.
I can execute uucico to send files, and it, frustratingly, almost works.
>From the Pi side, I see (with uulog):
uucico v7 - (2020-07-03 08:11:34.97 23106) Calling system v7 (port TCP)
uucico v7 - (2020-07-03 08:11:42.25 23106) Login successful
uucico v7 - (2020-07-03 08:11:44.44 23106) Handshake successful (protocol
'g' sending packet/window 64/3 receiving 64/7)
uucico v7 adam (2020-07-03 08:11:51.61 23106) Sending
/home/adam/git/simh/sim_scsi.h (6780 bytes)
uucico v7 adam (2020-07-03 08:16:21.79 23106) ERROR: Timed out waiting for
packet
uucico v7 - (2020-07-03 08:16:21.80 23106) Protocol 'g' packets: sent 86,
resent 6, received 1
uucico v7 - (2020-07-03 08:16:21.80 23106) Errors: header 2, checksum 0,
order 0, remote rejects 0
uucico v7 - (2020-07-03 08:16:22.51 23106) Call complete (283 seconds 5440
bytes 19 bps)
So it's clearly logging in, and if I telnet in directly, the v7 end is
starting uucico as expected:
login: pi-uucp
Password:
Shere
uulog -x on the v7 side has no output, and nothing ever appears in the
spool directory, which I suspect is a direct result of the timeout waiting
for packet.
So my question is, what else do I do to debug this? Clearly the pi (Taylor
UUCP) side is expecting something else--maybe an acknowledgement?--from the
v7 side to let it know the transmission was successful.
Any help would be appreciated.
Adam
