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Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!sgiblab!swrinde!cs.utexas.edu!math.ohio-state.edu!magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu!csn!boulder!cnsnews!spot.Colorado.EDU!frechett From: frechett@spot.Colorado.EDU (-=Runaway Daemon=-) Subject: [NetBSD 0.9] Kaleidoscope of questions Message-ID: <CJ75xx.G8z@cnsnews.Colorado.EDU> Keywords: tcsh, syscons, netbsd, IDE bug, term Sender: usenet@cnsnews.Colorado.EDU (Net News Administrator) Nntp-Posting-Host: spot.colorado.edu Organization: University of Colorado, Boulder Date: Thu, 6 Jan 1994 07:25:08 GMT Lines: 81 I've got questions in here for everyone. I've finally got NetBSD 0.9 in a relatively stable spot and have a few questions before I move on to -current and so forth. 1. It looks like I have the dreaded IDE bug. I get lockups now and again and have even gotten drive 'resetting' notices and so on. I heard that netbsd-current has a quick kludge to at least keep it from locking up the machine. Is this true? If so, what happens when it would normally lock up? What things can I avoid right NOW to keep from hitting this bug? 2. My machine had crashed 3 times in about 6 hours and someone mentioned to me that they had problems running tcsh as root's shell. I changed root's shell to csh and my machine has been up 30 hours. Coincidence? or is there some problem with tcsh? I only su to root occasionally. 3. I recently installed syscons1.2 (0.2 with netbsd patches) and am extremely pleased with it but I'm wondering if anyone has come up with the perfect syscons termcap entry yet? I get some odd results when trying to use bold/inverse/etc from the shell and when I run stuff under screen. A terminal connected to my machine has no problem setting bold/inverse/flash while under screen but I have less luck on the console. (I can do bold/inverse/flash at login shell but not in screen shell) Is there a fix for screen or syscons? 4. I recently set up a getty on my second com port (tty13 to avoid conflicts with syscons, and I notice some odd stuff. The hostname banner and login prompt are totally garbled on my roommate's PC but it works fine with my old CIT101 terminal. I get the impression it's displaying it all with the 8th bit set or something. I had this problem on the syscons VCs at first as well but it went away mysteriously. Does anyone know what causes this and how to fix it? My roommate must login from the garbled prompt and then type 'reset' to clean it up. Is there a getty option to specify 7 bit or anything? 5. wdc0: extra interrupt I'm getting sick of these. Is this related to the IDE bug, or something more fun? I haven't heard a good explaination for them yet. 6. Anyone have any problems with perl 4.0 @36? My machine was crashing a lot when I was doing a bunch of perl stuff. I stopped using perl but that was also before I changed a number of other things. Might it be contributing to the IDE bug lockups? 7. Has anyone come up with a reliable way to kill a local term process if the connection has gone bad? (dropped modem connection, killed remote term, random craziness) I've got a perl script that tries to send a trsh and waits for a reply for up to 45 seconds. It works for a random amount of time (5 minutes-5 hours) and then one of the trshes times out and my script kills the term process regardless of whether it's active or not. I've had it kill it right in the middle of my simply typing a letter over term. Is there a better way to do this? Someone showed me an ioctl call that was supposed to detect DCD and kill term if the line dropped but it doesn't work. I've also heard of simply killing off term if the number of retries goes too high. Has anyone had success with this and can suggest a reasonable number of retries which will avoid dropping a good connection? I need to be able to have term die so that my kermit scripts can put the machine back into a 'listen' state where it listens for an incoming series of calls telling it to login and start term so I can access my machine from elsewhere. Obviously kermit can't go on if the local term process NEVER dies.. Any and all help is greatly appreciated. Here's a list of everything that might be broken related to the above questions as they are all used extensively and together: setup: NetBSD 0.9 345M Maxtor IDE, 8M RAM, 170M dos partition, 175M boot bsd partition 12 syscons VCs, 14.4 modem tty00, 19.2 getty and terminal on tty13 software: syscons1.2, term1.0.8, tcsh6.04, term-ircII2.2.9, less-177. No X. thanks. ian