Doug rightly writes:

> Jeff Vance writes:
>
>  > Another person mentioned surprise at NETCONTROL and NSCONTROL
>  > being supported since these commands are typically needed and
>  > always seem to be executed from a job rather than directly from
>  > SYSSTART.  I double checked the code and NETCONTROL and NSCONTROL
>  > are in the list of supported commands.  I tried these commands
>  > on a test system and they did NOT work.  So, PROGEN accepted the
>  > commands but for some other reason they did not execute.
>
>  NETCONTROL and NSCONTROL don't actually do anything themselves. They
>  send a
>  message to a background process (NETCP.NET.SYS I think) to execute. Due to
>  timing issues at boot time NETCP is not ready to handle commands at the
>  moment SYSSTART executes so the task of starting the network is put into a
>  job instead.

Yes, that's seems to be exactly correct. The system is not completely "up"
during the period that SYSSTART is running, thus many things will simply not
work, regardless of whether or not they're "allowed" in the SYSSTART file.

We discovered this attribute quite some time ago on 5.5 when trying to launch
FTP and Telnet automatically from SYSSTART. As a consequence, we offloaded
most of our "sysstart" behaviors into subsequent jobs which are programmed to
begin two or three minutes after their launch in SYSSTART. The bottom part of
our SYSSTART job reads as:

   .
   .
   .
outfence 1
headoff 300
headoff 301
headoff 302
headoff 303
headoff 304
headoff 305
jobsecurity low;passexempt=user
stream startnet.pub.sys
stream jinetd.net;in=,,2
stream jftpstrt.arpa;in=,,2
stream mpeisup.xxxx.sys;in=,,3

Wirt Atmar