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>,

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

"Rich Abrahams" <Abrahams_Rich/SRJC_01@odie>,

"Jay Field" <Field_Jay/SRJC_01@odie>

From: "Scott Doty" <sdoty@odie>

Organization: Santa Rosa Junior College

Date: 8 Oct 92 22:30:00 PDT

Subject: Nermal: report for 27 sep 92 - 8 oct 92.

Reply-To: scott@cs.santarosa.edu

X-Pmrqc: 1

X-Pmlist: Project nermal

Here are the dates I promised: (from the latest version of the course

outline).

First objective:	October 2nd.

Second objective:	November 6th.

Third objective:	December 11th.

The following is archived on nermal under: /usr/adm/nermal/worklog.5

____________________________________________________________________

Objective 1: Hardware, OS, and system binary installation. (2 Oct)

Objective 2: User application installation (from source)	(6 Nov)

Objective 3: Management under user loading, campus-wide

message base.	(11 Dec)

Task	Status

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

Hardware installation	Done (1)

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

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

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

(1)	Hardware installation:

The Multi-port serial card isn't installed. Nermal has two ports, but only one phone line. We'll put the Multi-port card in when the lines become available, which may not happen until SRJC gets its new phone switch.

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

Linux 0.98 (*) [See Remarks (a)]

config.98 (*), ps+friends (*) [See Remarks (a)]

smtp (*), smtpd (*), svbinmail (*) [See Remarks (b)]

New User binaries:

lmail(*), mail(*), rmail(*), smail(*) [See Remarks (b)]

Active network services:

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

[See Remarks (c)]

(3) New User Applications:

None.

Remarks:

(A) New Linux Kernel

Linux 0.98 includes the latest tcpip (0.8.1) in the kernel -- I didn't have to add the extensions, just configured & recompiled (and corrected an

error in the distributed makefile, and recompiled again :).

However, strange things happen with the new kernel -- for instance,

upon the first boot, /dev/eth0 (the ethernet device node) *vanished*. I

haven't been able to re-create the error, but I suspect side effects from using the 0.97 config program. (Other *nices call this, "ifconfig.")

Speaking of config, a small (one line) patch was necessary for tcpip to work.

The new memory management routines required new ps+friends executables. To keep everything tidy, /bin/ps is a soft link to /usr/src/linux/ps/ps. The same is true for all other related executables. This makes changing kernels a snap -- just rename a couple of directories, and the kernel-dependant executables will find themselves.

Finally, the new kernel includes a "proc" filesystem, which (I've gathered, and maybe I'm wrong) allows processes to be accessed like files. I don't know why you'd want to do this, but it's there.

(B) Fun with mail

I found an smtp daemon (called, of course, "smtpd") that can be invoked from inetd. With this came a program (called "smtp") which can be used as a delivery agent. It's purely transport, and gives the mailer program full responsibility for aliases and routing.

The package (called "smsmtp") is small, modular, and easy to

maintain -- which is fortunate, since it was written for HP-UX, SYSVR2, and BSD4.[2,3] (I had to port it to Linux.) Sendmail is history -- and good riddance! :)

However, we're not out of the woods yet -- I still have to configure our local mailer to do the following:

1) properly accept remote traffic handed to it from smtpd

One mailer adds a local "From" line, so elm thinks all remote traffic came from "root" -- another mailer drops messages. The first mailer *does* put the remote site and "Received:" line in the mail header, so I'll fiddle with that first.

2) send remote traffic, using smtp

...meaning, the remote delivery program. I might rename the program to "smtpmail" to avoid confusion.

I'm quite excited by our new mail system -- this is the last system we need for all services to be provided to students. Nermal will be ready for users once I configure this and get the kinks out of rn. The Big Day is November 7th, to comply with objective 3.

The other mail executables listed above are all part of two uucp mail systems. Again, I have to figure out what's needed, what to junk, and how to configure the whole mess.

(c) Changes to network services

I tried pinging nermal -- it didn't answer. The "echo" service is internal to inetd. I'm not sure what's wrong here, but other internal services (chargen, discard, daytime) all work. I pinged from a real brain-dead version of ka9q NOS, so it might be my client.

I listed smtpd in the "Network Services" section because there *is* an smtp daemon on port 25, and it *will* answer incoming connections. However, incoming mail may be dropped without errors -- you won't even get a bounce message. So, please, don't mail anything to nermal (yet).

Coming up next:

Mail system configuration (as above)

Network news reader debugging (rn)

Manual system augmentation (groff)

Minor patches to file transfer system (ftpd)

_____________________________________________________________________

= Scott Doty, KB6ZLX Santa Rosa Junior College =

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

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