Ok, I just did an experiment with the rm command and the results surprised me.
On Unix v5 logged in as root I created a small test file then did
chmod 444 on it. Unfortunately it appears that mere users can still rm
the file and also directories are not safe from the rmdir command
(even directories set to mode 444).
This seems to be the case for v6 and v7 as well.
To be fair rm will prompt the user with: test1: 0100444 mode
but the user only has to type y and hit enter and the file is toast.
Is there no way to completely protect files from being deleted?
Mark
> From: Paul Ruizendaal
>>> the 1974 report on Spider
>> Is that online? If not, any chances you can make it so?
> It is a paper copy, but I can make a scan for you.
That makes it sounds like it might not be possible to put it online?
What's the exact title, so I can look and see if it's already online?
I'm pretty sure I've got a hardcopy of some Spider thing, but it would
probably take me a while to find it... ;-)
> I think that in the lifespan of Spider (1972-1978) there were 3 main
> network programs (basing myself on McIlroy's Unix Reader):
> - 'nfs' an FTP-like program ...
> - 'ufs' not sure what it was, but I think a telnet-like facility
> - 'npr' a network printing program
OK, the only one I have is 'nfs'. Here's the source, and man page:
http://ana-3.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/unix/s2/nfs.ahttp://ana-3.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/unix/man6/nfs.6
Noel
>
>> I'm looking into the history of Spider and early Datakit. Sandy Fraser
>> was kind enough to send me the 1974 report on Spider
>
> Is that online? If not, any chances you can make it so?
It is a paper copy, but I can make a scan for you.
> which contains the drivers tiu.c, mpx.c - I'm not sure what other files there
> are part of it?
I think tiu.c might be all. The TIU ("terminal access unit") was the network card,
so to speak (actually some 5 boards in a rack) and did a lot of the heavy lifting.
From the tiu.c file I understand that a DR11-B parallel I/O card was used on
the PDP side to connect to the TIU, and that access was structured as a block
device driver.
> I'm not at all clear how this stuff got there - someone at Bell must have just
> dumped the contents of the 'dmr' directory, and sent it all off?
Looks like it.
> The PWB1-based MIT systems also have a lot of the Spider software (although it
> was never used). It's a slightly different version than the one above: 'diff'
> shows that 'tiu.c' is almost identical, but mpx.c has more significant
> differences.
>
> It also contains man pages, and sources for some (?) user programs; I have the
> source and manpage for 'nfs'. What other names should I be looking for? (The
> man page for 'nfs' doesn't list any other commands.) I'll put them up
> momentarily.
I think that in the lifespan of Spider (1972-1978) there were 3 main network
programs (basing myself on McIlroy's Unix Reader):
- 'nfs' an FTP-like program to copy files to/from a central File Store.
I'm not sure whether the File Store was a Unix machine or something else.
- 'ufs' not sure what it was, but I think a telnet-like facility
- 'npr' a network printing program
A little surprising, but no reference to a Spider mail program in that document.
> In the meantime, I'll append the 'tiu' man page.
Thanks! It is from October 1973, which sounds right for Spider. I guess this
code is the first networking on Unix, predating the UoI work by about 18 months.
> From: Paul Ruizendaal
> I'm looking into the history of Spider and early Datakit. Sandy Fraser
> was kind enough to send me the 1974 report on Spider
Is that online? If not, any chances you can make it so?
> Does anybody know of surviving v5/v6/v7 code for Spider networking (e.g.
> the 'tiu' device driver, the 'nfs' file transfer package, etc.)?
You're in luck.
To start with, check out:
http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=SRI-NOSC/dmr/oldstuff
which contains the drivers tiu.c, mpx.c - I'm not sure what other files there
are part of it?
I'm not at all clear how this stuff got there - someone at Bell must have just
dumped the contents of the 'dmr' directory, and sent it all off?
The PWB1-based MIT systems also have a lot of the Spider software (although it
was never used). It's a slightly different version than the one above: 'diff'
shows that 'tiu.c' is almost identical, but mpx.c has more significant
differences.
It also contains man pages, and sources for some (?) user programs; I have the
source and manpage for 'nfs'. What other names should I be looking for? (The
man page for 'nfs' doesn't list any other commands.) I'll put them up
momentarily.
In the meantime, I'll append the 'tiu' man page. There isn't one for mpx,
alas.
Noel
--------
.th TIU IV 10/28/73
.sh NAME
tiu \*- Spider interface
.sh DESCRIPTION
Spider
is a fast digital switching network.
.it Tiu
is a directory which contains
files each referring to a Spider control
or data channel.
The file /dev/tiu/d\fIn\fR refers to data channel \fIn;\fR
likewise /dev/tiu/c\fIn\fR refers to control channel \fIn\fR.
.s3
The precise nature of the UNIX interface
is specified elsewhere.
.sh FILES
/dev/tiu/d?, /dev/tiu/c?
.sh BUGS
>> There are two other routes to TCP/IP on a PDP11 without split I/D:
>> ...
>> DCEC's adaptation of the Wingfield TCP/IP library, designed to work
>> with V6. It is mostly a user space daemon, but requires some kernel
>> enhancements.
>
> I wonder what the performance would be like, since the TCP is in a user
> process (a different one from the application), i.e. there's a process switch
> every time the application goes to send or receive data. This wouldn't have
> been such an issue when the code was written, since ARPANet-type networks
> were not very fast, but with a better network, it would have been limiting.
IEN98 (http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/ien/ien98.txt, page 2) has the answer: about 10kb/s.
The DCEC version used shared memory instead of rand ports and was claimed to be
a bit more performant, but I have no number. I'd be surprised if it was twice as fast,
so perhaps 15kb/s.
Paul
> From: Clem Cole
> So some other mechanism (also discussed here) needed to be created to
> avoid blocking in the application.
> ...
> Rand, UNET & Chaos had something else that gave the save async function,
> who's name I've forgotten at the moment
I don't think the RAND code had the non-blocking stuff; AFAICR, all it had was
named pipes (effectively). Jack Haverty at BBN defined and implemented two new
calls (IIRC, 'capac()' and 'await()') to do non-blocking I/O. The
documentation for that is in the 'BBN' branch at TUHS:
http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=BBN-V6/doc/ipc/awaithttp://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=BBN-V6/doc/ipc/ipc
My memory might be incorrect, but I don't think it was asynchronous (i.e. a
process issued a read() or write(), and that returned right away, before the
I/O was actually done, and the system notified the process later when the I/O
actually completed).
I actually did implement asyn I/O for an early LAN device driver - and just to
make it fun, the device was a DMA device, and we didn't want the overhead of a
copy, so the DMA was direct to buffers in the process - i.e. 'raw' I/O. So
that required some major system tweaks, to keep the process from being swapped
out - or moved around - while the I/O was pending.
> I believe Noel posted the code for same in the last year from one of the
> MIT kernels
I found it on the dump of an MIT machine, but it was never run on any machine
at MIT - we just had the source in case we had any use fot it.
Noel
> From: Paul Ruizendaal
> There are two other routes to TCP/IP on a PDP11 without split I/D:
> ...
> DCEC's adaptation of the Wingfield TCP/IP library, designed to work
> with V6. It is mostly a user space daemon, but requires some kernel
> enhancements.
I wonder what the performance would be like, since the TCP is in a user
process (a different one from the application), i.e. there's a process switch
every time the application goes to send or receive data. This wouldn't have
been such an issue when the code was written, since ARPANet-type networks
were not very fast, but with a better network, it would have been limiting.
> From: Steve Simon
> do you have pointers to any documentation on the rand/MIT network API?
There was no 'MIT' network API. He was talking about the CHAOSNet API. The
TCP/IP done in the CSR group at MIT used a totally different API.
The various Unix systems at MIT were pretty well out of touch with each other,
and did not exchange code. The only exceptions were the DSSR (later RTS) and
CSR groups in Tech Sq, who used pretty much the same system.
Noel
I had somehow convinced myself that Ultrix-11 needed split I/D, but indeed it does not:
# file unix
unix: (0450) pure overlay executable not stripped
# size unix
14784+(8192,8000,8064,8000,8064,8128,8000,7808,7936,7936,7680,7360,1344)+3524+13500 = 31808b = 076100b (111296 total text)
With only 16KB of permanent kernel there will be a lot of overlay switching. I'm not entirely sure why bss could not be 1KB smaller, enabling 8KB more of permanent kernel. The loss of performance from 2 disk buffers less really outweighed less overlay switching?
If I understand correctly, the network code continuously switches around segment 5 to access the right mbuf.
According to the notes in the TUHS archive (http://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/DEC/Ultrix-11/Fred-Ultrix3/setup-…) running Ultrix-11 with networking on a 11/40 class machine is borderline workable:
"I have personally tested it on a 23+, 53 and 83. I know it runs
fine on the 73. The smaller machines (34, 40 etc) should work
akin to the 23, meaning using overlays and be very tight on RAM
for the drivers. TCP/IP is a biiiiig load for those systems!"
There are two other routes to TCP/IP on a PDP11 without split I/D:
- 3COM's TCP/IP package (initially an overlay over V7, soon after also over 2BSD); I believe the source to this is lost.
- DCEC's adaptation of the Wingfield TCP/IP library, designed to work with V6. It is mostly a user space daemon, but requires some kernel enhancements. The Wingfield code is in the TUHS archive, but that version has a modified V6 kernel that also supports NCP networking and requires split I/D. If used with a minimally enhanced V6 kernel, it would easily fit in 64KB, without overlays.
Note that these last two options have very different API's and would not be so easy to work with.
Paul
-----Original Message-----
From: pechter(a)gmail.com
To: arnold(a)skeeve.com
Sent: Sat, 20 May 2017 16:41
Subject: Re: [TUHS] Unix with TCP/IP for small PDP-11s
Missed the reply all on the phone. Phil Karn had KA9Q in the 80s... It is mentioned on Wikipedia... Don't know much more. PPP might be better than slip.
Bill
-----Original Message-----
From: arnold(a)skeeve.com
To: pechter(a)gmail.com
Sent: Sat, 20 May 2017 16:12
Subject: Re: [TUHS] Unix with TCP/IP for small PDP-11s
Yes! Do you want to follow up to the list please?
Thanks,
Arnold
William Pechter <pechter(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> KA9Q sound right?
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: arnold(a)skeeve.com
> To: imp(a)bsdimp.com, bqt(a)update.uu.se
> Cc: tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org
> Sent: Sat, 20 May 2017 15:06
> Subject: Re: [TUHS] Unix with TCP/IP for small PDP-11s
>
> Warner Losh <imp(a)bsdimp.com> wrote:
>
> > I read the sources to see the TCP/IP support was there (that's the bit
> > about adding Berkeley Sockets). I see nowhere that it's excluded for the
> > non I/D machines, but haven't tried it first hand. I got interested not
> > because of the PDP-11, but because I have an old Rainbow that recently
> > started running Venix (v7-based version) and was trolling around for some
> > way to do TCP/IP to it (though w/o readily available ethernet cards, I'm
> > not sure it is a viable project).
>
> Boy is the memory going. What was the TCP/IP implementation people
> ran on DOS to do connections over serial lines? Could that be found
> and revived for such a system?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Arnold
On 2017-05-21 23:27, Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
> Actually, the 11/60's main claim to fame was it supposed to be a
> 'commercial' PDP-11 and was built for the small business market. The WCS
> was a side effect.
As you mentioned in another mail, it's main claim to fame was probably
the short time it actually existed in the market. DEC seriously did some
things wrong on it, such as only 18-bit address, and no split I/D space,
at a time when pretty much any other PDP-11 was going there.
But it was also one of a couple of -11 models where you had the ability
to write your own microcode. But I've never heard of anyone who had the
WCS option. (But at one point, I was playing with four 11/60 machines in
a computer club.)
I don't remember if it was you or someone else who said that there were
several microcode bugs in the 11/60. It ran the DEC OSes, but there were
some issues with Unix. I seem to also remember seeing some special code
in the RSX kernel for some 11/60 oddity, but I would have to search
through the code to remember exactly what that was about.
> It was to built to run RSTS and RSX and had a commercial instruction set
> exten *etc.*. Somebody had written a 'dentist office' package for it and a
> 'car dealership package' IIRC. And was physically packaged a tad
> differently than the other 11's as it was trying to be marketing to places
> that might want to show it off instead of hiding it in a computer room.
Uh? I have not seen any plans ever mentioning CIS for the 11/60, but I
guess it's possible it was considered at some point. But I can assure
you no CIS ever existed for the 11/60.
The only machines that ever had the CIS option was the 11/44 and
11/23,11/24.
But I have no idea how many machines ever actually had the option installed.
One nice detail of the 11/60 is that it had the FPP build in. But there
was also an optional hardware FPP accelerator available.
Johnny
--
Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus
|| on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt(a)softjar.se || Reading murder books
pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol