I attempted to reply privately to Glenn Cole, but his e-mail address bounced.
Since the rest of HP3000-L might also be interested, I'm re-posting this
publicly in the hopes that it will reach Glenn under his probably different
subscription address.
Mail Delivery Subsystem writes:
----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors -----
[log in to unmask]
----- Transcript of session follows -----
... while talking to mx-sl.slip.net.:
>>> RCPT To:<[log in to unmask]>
<<< 553 relaying to <[log in to unmask]> prohibited by administrator
550 gcole@slip.net... User unknown
...deletia...
From: Mark Bixby <markb>
Message-Id: <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Suggestions for POSIX ports?
To: [log in to unmask] (Glenn Cole)
Date: Mon, 21 Apr 1997 11:15:19 -0700 (PDT)
Reply-To: [log in to unmask]
In-Reply-To: <[log in to unmask]> from "Glenn Cole" at Apr 20, 97 11:09:37 am
Glenn Cole writes:
> There has been mention that there are still many tools that would be
> useful if ported to POSIX. I am interested in helping in this effort.
> If nothing else, I would like to gain the experience of such a port.
You can find the full list of all freeware packages (and links to source) that
I've found useful on my HPUX systems at:
http://www.cccd.edu/dis/freeware.html
The "important stuff" that I think should be ported to allow 3000-only shops
to participate fully on the net:
1) syslog() client routines and syslogd server. Many Unix daemon (i.e. always
running background processes) packages want to log events to syslog. Syslog
is part of FOS on most Unix systems, but you can find free-standing
implementations embedded in various packages for deviant Unixes that lack a
syslog of their own. I made a quick attempt at porting the syslog that comes
with the INN news server, but ran into the use of writev() which isn't there on
MPE POSIX. Not a big deal to write a writev() substitute that calls write()
iteratively, but I didn't have the time, and moved on to other things. But
note that I discovered some sort of syslog support in INSVXL.NET.SYS last
week as mentioned on HP3000-L -- no public or private replies to my message
so far.
2) BIND (DNS). MPE sorely needs DNS server capability. BIND also includes
a client library used by other packages. Requires syslog.
3) Sendmail. A mail transport agent that queues outgoing e-mail for delivery,
and accepts incoming mail and stores it in user mailboxes. Mail transport
only; does not include user mail composition and mail reading capability.
Requires syslog and BIND client library.
4) Elm or any other mail user agent for composing and reading e-mail. Requires
sendmail.
5) INN Usenet news server. Requires syslog, BIND client library, and sendmail.
See the dependency pattern here? That's why I think these are the most
important pieces to port.
If you've never done a port before, here is a quick list of things to watch
out for:
- Autoconfigure scripts may silently fail, returning invalid results to tests
checking the existence or non-existence of operating system features. Scripts
expect compiler errors to show up in $?, which doesn't alway happen with the
MPE port of gcc. Scripts may expect unresolved externals to generate a
compiler error -- doesn't happen on MPE, because unresolveds only happen at
run time. The better scripts try to run their compiled test programs rather
than just looking for a compiler error.
- MPE lacks many standard files under /usr/include that you'll have to #ifdef/
#ifndef around in the source code.
- MPE may lack specific POSIX functions, but a close substitute may be
available.
- You'll want to -D_POSIX_SOURCE and -D_SOCKET_SOURCE on your compiles.
- sfcntl() within -lsocket is broken and cannot disable O_NONBLOCK. Use
ioctl() FIOSNBIO instead. An SR has been submitted.
If you run into trouble, post to HP3000-L. :-)
--
Mark Bixby E-mail: [log in to unmask]
Coast Community College Dist. Web: http://www.cccd.edu/~markb/
District Information Services 1370 Adams Ave, Costa Mesa, CA, USA 92626-5429
Technical Support +1 714 438-4647
"You can tune a file system, but you can't tune a fish." - tunefs(1M)
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