To:	"Gary Brown" <brown@cis.santarosa.edu>,

"Lloyd Onyett" <Onyett_Lloyd/SRJC_01@odie>,

"Dave Johnston" <dave@cs.santarosa.edu>,

"Dane Jasper" <jasper@bcl.santarosa.edu>,

"Peter Crayne" <pcrayne@odie>,

"Scott Doty" <scott@cs.santarosa.edu>

"Rich Abrahams" <Abrahams_Rich/SRJC_01@odie>

From: "Scott Doty" <sdoty@odie>

Organization: Santa Rosa Junior College

Date: 21 Sep 92 19:04:25 PDT

Subject: Nermal: report for week ending 19sep92.

Reply-To: scott@cs.santarosa.edu

X-Pmrqc: 1

X-Mailer: Pegasus Mail v2.3 (R3).

X-Pmlist: Project nermal

Last week, I said:

The following is archived on nermal under: /usr/adm/nermal/worklog.4

____________________________________________________________________

Objective 1: Hardware, OS, and system binary installation. (date?)

Objective 2: User application installation (from source)	(date?)

I will send an update tomorrow w/dates -- I can't retreive them now, as the machine upon which they reside is temporarily unavailable. If you need dates immediately, please refer to your copy of the course objectives. (I would

have waited, but I didn't want this to delay this message any longer.)

Task	Status

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

Hardware installation	Pending (1)

Software installation (system/user binaries)	Pending (2)

Software installation (user apps fm/sources)	Pending (3)

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

(1)	Hardware installation:

Hard disk reconfiguration completed [See Remarks (A)].

Multi-port serial card not installed.

(2)	New System binaries: ("*" denotes compiled on site.)

mail (*), rmail (*), ftpd (*) [See Remarks (B)]

New User binaries:

none.

Active network services:

telnet, ftp, finger, echo, discard, daytime, chargen.

(note: no anonymous user for ftp. I don't think there ever will be, unless I can limit connections to our domain.)

(3)	New User applications (from source):

rn (*) [See Remarks (C)].

Mailpak 1.3 (elm, uucp+friends) (*) (note: uucp is not activated, nor configured.)

Remarks:

(A) Our strange hard disk, and disk space considerations.

After archiving the system and making a network-ready boot diskette,	I attempted to reconfigure the hard drive to use a reduced cylinder count. This failed: most large drives can be configured to "trick" the controller card into thinking it has an extra head, and half as many cylinders than it actually has -- ours cannot.

However, we have two alternatives: I can either get us another controller card (not likely), or modify Linux's block device driver (not trivial). I'll be investigating the latter, but, in the meantime, we're

stuck with only 260 megs. ("*Only* 260 megs"? :) )

We *do* have more space available, though -- I've built two new filesystems. The full list follows:

mount point	size

/	20 megs

/usr	40 megs

/usr/src	64 megs

/home	64 megs

(swap)	16 megs

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

Grand total	204 megs

which leaves 56 megs for future allocation [probably to /home (the users' home directories) and /usr/spool/news (network news)]. Also, once everything is completed, much of /usr/src can be archived and removed.

On a sidenote, a fellow Linuxer is working on NFS; for those who don't know, NFS is a tcpip-based file server/client system for Unix, much like what Novell does for MS-DOS and macs. Clarkson University has a Public Domain NFS server, which runs on a PC. So, in the future, it might be possible for nermal to access files on a Novell server. That might be neat for generic

items, like news. (Stop salivating, Dane! :)

(B) mail, rmail

These work on site. The only program we need for off-site mail is	"sendmail" -- I have two versions (5.65 & 5.67), and neither compile. Other users have reported success with sendmail 5.65c -- apparently, they have the newest version of gcc: gcc 2.2.2d7 (with new libraries), which requires Linux 0.97-patch.4.

I just got used to 2.2.2d! Nevertheless, with Linus' new kernel (0.98), it's time to upgrade the kernel and development goodies.

Once we're current, I'll try again with sendmail, or, possibly MMDM (a sendmail replacement which I know nothing about) -- if *still* no dice, I'll appeal to the Linux mailing list for help.

(C) rn -- our first network news reader.

I've built rn, which works for reading news. Some permissions aren't set correctly, so it will complain on startup. Further, you cannot shell out of it without causing a segmentation violation. So, it needs work, but it's usable. I'll keep everyone posted (pun intended) as things develop.

Note that the default editor is "joe," which is much easier for new users to learn. Try "man rn" for a list of user-configurable features.

_____________________________________________________________________

= Scott Doty, KB6ZLX Santa Rosa Junior College =

= Technician, Campus Data & Hardware 1501 Mendocino Ave. =

= Internet: Scott@cs.santarosa.edu Santa Rosa, CA 95401 =