TUHS

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6532 discussions

by Dave Horsfall

Ken Iverson was born in 1920; he is (in)famous for inventing APL. And if you haven't used APL\360 on a dumb Kleinschmidt[*] terminal, you didn't miss anything. [*] And that's the first time I've seen a spell-checker suggest that it be replaced with "Consummated". -- Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

9 years, 6 months

Pre-v6 images and 2.11BSD patches

by Peter Jeremy

Some time ago, someone posted an early Unix image that I recall running. I know it was pre-groups but don't recall anything else and I can't find either the images or mailing list references either locally or on tuhs.org. Does anyone recall the details. Also, I've seen suggestions that there's a 2.11BSD patch later than 447 but I can't find anything "official" and www.2bsd.com is either down or inaccessible from all the systems I have access to. Does anyone know if 448 or later were released? And given the issues with www.2bsd.com would someone be willing to mirror it (assuming we can got a copy of it)? -- Peter Jeremy

9 years, 6 months

Re: [TUHS] Testing, testing..

by Dave Horsfall

> I got it. Ta muchly! All seems OK now, after TUHS moved to a new ISP (linode, which, ahem, is known for hosting spammers). -- Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

9 years, 6 months

Testing, testing..

by Dave Horsfall

1 2 3... Is this mic on? Tap tap... Seriously, my anti-spam defences were having an issue with this list for a while, so let's see whether it comes back. -- Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

9 years, 6 months

Broken TUHS mirror: li1202-53.members.linode.com

by Dave Horsfall

Could whoever runs this broken mirror please fix the damned mailer so that it handles my RFC-compliant banner? I do not appreciate retries every five seconds or so, because Dovecot cannot seem to handle a multi-line SMTP banner (a great spam defence); I have since firewalled the IP address of 45.79.103.53 out of self-defence. Thank you. -- Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

9 years, 6 months

TUHS Mail Archive is now searchable

by Warren Toomey

All, I've finally set up a search system for the mailing list. It's at http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/tuhs.cgi and it's also hyperlinked on the main list page at http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tuhs I've not yet set up a cron job to keep it updated, and yes the interface is ugly but it works. Cheers, Warren

9 years, 6 months

tar on v6 not creating directories on v6

by Will Senn

All, I'm stuck trying to determine what is going on with v6tar on v6. It seems to work ok for files, but gets confused with subdirectories. I set up a test folder structure: t/dmr/vs.c t/dmr/vt.c t/ken/prf.c then I created a tarball tar cvf t.tar t then I tried to extract the tarball. It made a mess: # tar xvf t.tar Tar: blocksize = 17 y ? tar: t/ken/prf.c - cannot create y ? y ? tar: t/dmr/vs.c - cannot create y ? y ? tar: t/dmr/vt.c - cannot create That was ugly and all of it was output. What exactly did I wind up with?: # ls -l total 19 drwxrwxrwx 2 root 32 Oct 10 12:54 y -rw-rw-rw- 1 root 8704 Oct 10 12:54 t.tar Ugh. Probably don't need the y directory... # rmdir y y ? # ls y y not found Wow! It appears that I am unable to delete the y directory or list it by name. That can't be good. Any ideas of how to remove this directory are welcome. Not to be deterred by one small failure, I copied the same tarball over to v7 on the off chance that maybe v6tar isn't really for v6, but more for moving files(and directories) over to v7 as Haley and Ritchie describe, and lo and behold tar on v7 is able to extract both files and directories from the same tarball without any trouble: # tar xvf t.tar Tar: blocksize = 17 x t/ken/prf.c, 2301 bytes, 5 tape blocks x t/dmr/vs.c, 1543 bytes, 4 tape blocks x t/dmr/vt.c, 834 bytes, 2 tape blocks # ls -l total 18 drwxrwxr-x 4 root 64 Dec 31 19:27 t -rw-rw-r-- 1 root 8704 Dec 31 19:27 t.tar # ls t dmr ken # ls t/dmr vs.c vt.c # ls t/ken prf.c Interesting. After looking at the tar source, the question marks in the output appear to be coming from somewhere outside of tar (perhaps mkdir or chown?). Also, the "cannot create" message comes from the following snippet of the tar source, which looks reasonable: ... if ((ofile = creat(dblock.dbuf.name, stbuf.st_mode & 07777)) < 0) { fprintf(stderr, "tar: %s - cannot create\n", dblock.dbuf.name); ... I think this error is simply an effect related to the failure to create the necessary directories properly. The code to do that looks pretty straightforward: checkdir(name) register char *name; { register char *cp; int i; for (cp = name; *cp; cp++) { if (*cp == '/') { *cp = '\0'; if (access(name, 01) < 0) { if (fork() == 0) { execl("/bin/mkdir", "mkdir", name, 0); execl("/usr/bin/mkdir", "mkdir", name, 0); fprintf(stderr, "tar: cannot find mkdir!\n"); done(0); } while (wait(&i) >= 0); chown(name, stbuf.st_uid, stbuf.st_gid); } *cp = '/'; } } } I speculate that chown is causing the "?" to be displayed. Is it safe enough for me to add printf statements around this code to see what's going on, or is there a better approach? Thanks, Will

9 years, 6 months

Re: [TUHS] why does tar have the tape device hard coded into it and why is it mt1 instead of mt0

by norman＠oclsc.org

/dev/makefile on the V7 distribution tape (or at least the unpacked image I have that I believe to be same) says: ht: /etc/mknod mt0 b 7 64 /etc/mknod mt1 b 7 0 /etc/mknod rmt0 c 15 64 /etc/mknod rmt1 c 15 0 /etc/mknod nrmt0 c 15 192 /etc/mknod nrmt1 c 15 128 chmod go+w mt0 mt1 rmt0 rmt1 nrmt0 nrmt1 According to /usr/sys/dev/ht.c, the minor device number was used as follows: minor(dev) & 07 slave unit number minor(dev) & 070 controller unit number minor(dev) & 0100 tape density: set == 800 bpi, clear 1600 minor(dev) & 0200 no-rewind flag It takes some digging in the source code (and the PDP-11 Peripherals Handbook) to understand all this numerology. In most of the code, minor(dev) & 077 is just treated as a unit number (fair enough). The use of 0200 appears only as a magic number in htopen; that of 0100 only as a magic number in htstart, and that only implied: the test is not minor(dev) & 0100, but unit = minor(bp->b_dev) & 0177; if(unit > 077) Not so bad when the whole driver is only 376 lines of code, but it wouldn't have hurt to make it 400 lines if that meant fewer magic numbers. Anyway, what all this means is that /dev/*mt0 and /dev/*mt1 both actually meant slave 0 on TU16 controller 0, but mt0 was 800 bpi and mt1 1600 bpi. Hence, I would guess, tar's default to mt1. My first exposure to the insides of UNIX was in the High Energy Physics group at Caltech. Some of our systems had multiple tape drives and every drive supported multiple densities, so we invented for ourselves a system like that many other sites invented, with names like /dev/rmt3h to mean the third tape drive at high density. (Hence the USG naming scheme of /dev/rmt/3h and the like--not that we taught it to them, just that many places had the same idea.) Our world wasn't nearly as exciting as that of our neighbors, across the building and three floors down, in the Space Radiation Laboratory. They had a huge room full of racks of magtapes full of data from satellites, and many locally- written tools for extracting the data so researchers could work on it. The hardware was an 11/70 with eight tape drives, and at any given time at least half the the drives would be spinning. One of the drives was seven-track rather than nine-track, because some of the satellite data had been written in that format. Fair disclosure: I had a vague memory that the `drive number' in the device name had been recycled for other purposes, but couldn't remember whether it was density or something else. (I'm a little surprised none of the other old-timers here remembered that, but maybe I worked with tapes more than them.) But I had to dig into the source code for the details; I didn't remember all that. And I did have to climb up to the high shelf in my home office for a Peripherals Handbook to understand the magic numbers being stuffed into registers! Norman Wilson Toronto ON

9 years, 6 months

Re: [TUHS] why does tar have the tape device hard coded into it and why is it mt1 instead of mt0

by Doug McIlroy

> I have no memory of why Ken used mt1 not mt0. Doug may know. I don't know either. Come to think of it, I can't remember ever using tar without option -f. Direct machine-to-machine trasfer, e.g. by uucp, took a lot of business away from magtape soon after tar was introduced. Incidentally, I think tar was written by Chuck Haley or Greg Chesson, not Ken. Doug

9 years, 6 months

Re: [TUHS] TUHS] why does tar have the tape device hard coded into it and why is it mt1 instead of mt0

by Doug McIlroy

Forget that I said, "I think that tar was written by Chuck Haley or Greg Chesson". Ken confirms that he wrote it, for dectape. Doug

9 years, 6 months

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