*BSD News Article 5426


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Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
Path: sserve!manuel!munnari.oz.au!uunet!caen!destroyer!terminator!news
From: pauls@icecreambar.css.itd.umich.edu (Paul Southworth)
Subject: 386bsd: memory error, perl, ftp problems, tset, compiling
Message-ID: <1992Sep22.201124.19207@terminator.cc.umich.edu>
Keywords: 386bsd perl ftp tset swap
Sender: news@terminator.cc.umich.edu (Usenet Owner)
Reply-To: pauls@umich.edu
Organization: University of Michigan
Date: Tue, 22 Sep 1992 20:11:24 GMT
Lines: 70

Please help with the following problems.  I haven't seen them in my  
several cursory readings of Terry's magnificent FAQ.  Will summarize if  
there is interest.

Background:  OPTi 386WB (64k) motherboard, AMD 386/40, Western Digital  
124Mb IDE, 4Mb 80ns RAM, plain ole VGA card (Oak).  Full binary and etc  
distributions for 0.1 installed. Default amount of swap (whatever that is)  
after normal installation.

*****

Problem #1:  Received the following error today.  Was just minding my own  
business, cleaning up files.  I was the only user on the system and I had  
no user-initiated background processes going.

%rm *
free (20008) above top of memory.memtop = 2b800 membot = 23504

<then it logged me out>

What the heck is *that*?

*****

Problem #2: PERL!  How do I get it for 386BSD?  Can you think of any  
better (or alternately effective) way to mirror an ftp site?  PERL was  
suggested by the person whose site it is I want to mirror.

*****

Problem #3:  Many times people ftp'ing into my anonymous site (you can try  
it yourself if you want--redspread.css.itd.umich.edu or 141.211.182.91)  
will find that there is no visible directory structure.  This happens  
EVERY time when people use those godawful FTP front-end programs, like  
NeXT FTP+ or Fetch 2.x for the Mac.  There is a connection, and if they  
specify file and directory path, they can download, but no file list shows  
up.  I have (rarely) also found this to be the case when ftp'ing without  
using one of those programs, but they do fail 100% of the time.

*****

Problem #4: Compiling.  My hunch is that this is either a RAM or swap  
deficiency problem, but I would like advice as to how to alleviate  
crashing (ie, hanging) when I attempt to compile things with make & cc.   
For example, I have tried to compile Kermit that came with the etc01  
distribution, among other things, and found that EVERY time I compile  
something the system will crash.  It will go merrily about its way  
(seeming slow to me, but what do I know?) and give perhaps 4 or 5  
non-error messages, then it will just freeze.  It does this in single user  
mode as well as with multiple users on the system, and I have tried it  
remotely (after su to root) and at console (logging in as superuser).
If this is a memory/swap deficiency, as I suspect, what would be  
acceptable amount of swap (which is cheaper than RAM after all, especially  
since the hard drive is paid for) to have on a machine that may get a fair  
bit of ftp traffic, will rarely have more than two users involved with  
interactive sessions, has no newsreading going on, no X (just say no to  
X), and is not being used as a developer's workstation (ie, I just want to  
compile some stuff other people have written occasionally).

*****

Problem #5:  "tset" -- where is it please?  I have looked on a couple of  
ftp sites and found the src/.../tset directory empty.  I would feel very  
special if I could have tset on my machine for my very own.


Paul Southworth                    |  ftp to redspread.css.itd.umich.edu
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