EAGLE Visions, Spring 1996

EAGLE Visions is published quarterly. We welcome your comments, suggestions, and story ideas.

Business alliances form important international connections for EAGLE
DISK_PAK for UNIX: Defragmenter helps Ford Electronics' system performance
Russian engineer joins EAGLE staff
TECH TIP for UNIX; fuser: It's cool, and it's free!
DISK_PAK OnLine! enhancement simplifies scheduling
Streamline your electronic office with MAID for CEO

Business alliances form important international connections for EAGLE

Global commerce is no longer confined to Fortune 500 companies with millions of dollars in advertising and travel budgets. Doing business internationally is rapidly becoming a necessity for businesses at all levels.

EAGLE Software has been involved in international sales and consulting for most of its 15 years of operation. As well as selling from its headquarters in Salina, Kansas, EAGLE has also enlisted the help of resellers throughout the world.

"International business has always been a big part of EAGLE's market share, making up at least 25 percent of our revenues," said Dave Hiechel, president and CEO. "The international aspect of our business is so important we have dedicated one person to that area, with the sole purpose of supporting our international clients and resellers."

Dedicated staffer

That staff member is Cheryl Larson, international sales representative. Larson works with about 35 resellers from around the world in the promotion and sales of EAGLE's products.

"Our international resellers allow us to maintain a local perspective," Larson said. "The resellers know customs and business practices within their region, and most importantly, can overcome the language barrier we would face if we dealt directly with many of our international customers."

A part of each reseller agreement includes advertising and promoting the products in appropriate media within that region of the world. EAGLE advertisements have been developed by resellers in many languages, including Chinese, Japanese, German, French, and Spanish. Some resellers have also translated EAGLE literature into their language.

Renewable resources

Hiechel said the expertise EAGLE personnel has developed can provide a valuable resource to our international resellers. An example of this sharing of knowledge took place recently when Klaus Fuchs, president of Prosys GmbH, and a reseller for EAGLE products, spent a week in Salina for hands-on training with EAGLE personnel. Prosys GmbH is in Weisendorf, Germany.

Professional training

While Fuchs was in the U.S., EAGLE called on another business partner, Datatek, Inc., and its president, Dan Horn. EAGLE sells Datatek's Intuitive Office, an office management system, and TBAM, a hierarchical data manager. Horn came to Salina to provide in-depth training for both EAGLE staff members and Fuchs. Fuchs is already working with a customer to install TBAM-Net, an add-on product for TBAM.

"We plan to continue to develop these kinds of mutually beneficial relationships," Hiechel said, "both in the U.S. and internationally. We are working with Oracle, Data General, Spectra Logic, and many other companies to provide total solutions for our customers." Hiechel said similar training sessions such as the one conducted by Horn add to the level of support EAGLE can provide.

DISK_PAK for UNIX: Defragmenter helps Ford Electronics' system performance

Over the last couple of years, Ford Electronics has started adding the word "service" to their name in advertising. And it must be paying off since Jerry Rains, president, bought the company in 1978, they have grown from two employees to more than 20. Rains even had to contact his architect recently.

"I told him we are getting ready to double our space," Rains said.

Based in North Little Rock, Arkansas, Rains is expanding his consumer electronic repair business. Ford Electronics does a large number of repairs on warranty for 35-40 manufacturers. They recently signed a contract with Sharp to service all of their consumer electronics returned for repairs through the Wal-Mart Discount Stores.

"We used to get 5 or 10 machines in a day," Rains said. "Yesterday we got 35 from Sharp, and today we got 20."

To keep track of this increasing business, housed in three locations in Little Rock, Rains relies on a 486 DX/100 running SCO. He said he had a disk I/O bottleneck, and he was trying to isolate the problem. And that's where EAGLE Software's product DISK_PAK for UNIX comes into the picture. Rains had a 7 Mb file that was taking 1 minute and 42 seconds to copy, even when he reduced the system to single user.

"That's too long!" he said. "That's when I knew I needed a defragger."

Rains said he called a business acquaintance, Don Winterhalter, from Aurora Software in New Hampshire. Winterhalter told him there were some defragmenting programs on the market, and told him about DISK_PAK.

"I downloaded it off the Net, ran it, and it told me both the root and user were 18 percent fragmented. It also said the worst fragmented file was my customer key file - that 7 Mb file I was copying! I knew it shouldn't take that long. Boy, was I sold then!"

Rains called EAGLE, got the activation key code for DISK_PAK, and that 7 Mb file went from 1 minute and 42 seconds, to 16 seconds to copy. "I had the proof I needed right there," he said. Rains said DISK_PAK for UNIX is a simple program to run, and they are having less drag downs than before they started running DISK_PAK for UNIX.

Ford Electronics is doing more regional work, Rains said, and continues to see an expanding market in consumer electronics repair. Rains' parents own a retail consumer electronics store, and Rains joined them in business after serving as a pilot in the U.S. Marine Corps. He worked there until he bought Ford Electronics in 1978.

Rains said they still get occasional calls seeking repairs on Ford car electronics, (a man with the last name of Ford started the business), but as business continues to boom, Ford Electronics will be ready to handle the load.

Russian engineer joins EAGLE staff

The Internet is becoming more of an integral part of the business community everyday, and for EAGLE Software, it has played several important roles. One of those roles was to help us fill a development position in the company.

Alexander Ivanov joined the company in January as a UNIX programmer. He had posted his resume on his home page on the World Wide Web, and Andy Kratzer, senior software engineer at EAGLE, found Ivanov's page. Kratzer thought Ivanov's qualifications matched what EAGLE was looking for in the vacant programmer position.

Dave Hiechel, president and CEO of EAGLE, corresponded with Ivanov to see if he was interested in the position. After more correspondence and extensive phone interviews, Hiechel hired Ivanov.

Ivanov is from Latvia, a former Soviet republic. While in Riga, the capital of Latvia, Ivanov earned degrees in program engineering and computer science from Riga Aviation University. He was studying in Oxford, England, when Kratzer found his resume.

Ivanov said one of the things that surprised him the most once he arrived in the United States was that everyone drove to their destinations; he is used to walking. Salina's Midwest small-town sprawl soon showed Ivanov why we all drive, and he purchased a bicycle to help him get around town.

Ivanov uses email to communicate regularly with his family in Russia and his friends in England.

TECH TIP for UNIX

fuser: It's cool, and it's free!

Many system administrative tasks either should be, or must be performed on an unmounted filesystem. For example, to safely verify (with fsck), copy (with dd), or optimize (with EAGLE's DISK_PAK product) a filesystem, you must first unmount the filesystem with the UNIX umount command.

But before UNIX will allow you to unmount a filesystem, it first makes sure that the filesystem is not in use. If any process is using any file or directory within that filesystem (even if someone is sitting in a directory within that filesystem) the umount command will fail. Before you can successfully unmount the filesystem, you must determine which process or processes are using the filesystem, and eliminate them. Unfortunately, the only information you get from umount is that the filesystem is "busy" ... not much help!

The UNIX fuser command will report the pid (Process I.D.) number of all the processes that are currently using a specific file or directory. It also gives an indication of how the process is using the file or directory: "c" indicates it is the current directory of the process, "o" indicates the process has the file open, etc.

Still, this isn't much help, unless you want to run fuser on every file and directory within a filesystem. On some platforms, fuser will optionally report all users of a filesystem if you specify the mount point of the filesystem. On all platforms we tried, except SunOS (the man page said it should work, but on Rev. 4.1.3, it didn't!), if you specify the device on which the filesystem resides, fuser will report all users of that device, and therefore, the filesystem. Two other fuser options that are common to all platforms are: -u to direct fuser to report the username of each process it finds, along with the pid number, and -k to direct fuser to "kill" each process it finds ... a little risky for us.

Suppose you wanted to unmount "/opt" as in the example below:

# umount /opt
umount: /opt busy

The first step is to use df to determine which device "/opt" resides on, if you don't already know:

# df /opt
/opt    (/dev/dsk/c1d0s6     ):867134 blocks    418221 files

Then, use fuser to determine which processes are using the device "/dev/dsk/c1d0s6":

# fuser -u /dev/dsk/c1d0s6
/dev/dsk/c1d0s6:    578c(root)     576c(root)

And then use ps to track down each process and determine if it can be eliminated.

# ps -fp 578,576
 UID   PID  PPID  C    STIME TTY      TIME COMD
root   576   568 17 08:40:03 pts/4    0:00 sh
root   578   523 14 08:40:24 pts/2    0:00 sh

However, it is important to keep in mind that between the time the fuser is done and the process is killed, the original process could have terminated on its own and you could end up killing a new, innocent process.

We've written a script that does the fuser, then does a ps on each PID found, and allows you to send a message to or kill each PID individually. You can download the script file from our home page at http://www.eaglesoft.com/files/chkusr.

Remember, you can't unmount the root filesystem ("/") without bringing the system down.

DISK_PAK OnLine! enhancement simplifies scheduling

The BATCH_ONLINE.CLI macro has been added to simplify the automatic scheduling of DISK_PAK OnLine! If you run the BATCH_ONLINE.CLI macro with no arguments (or invalid arguments), it will print the correct syntax as shown below:

Syntax: batch_online ldu date time frequency switches
   ldu
       is the root directory of the disk to be optimized
   date
       is the first day that OnLine! is to be run (DD-MMM-YY)
   time
       is the time of day to start OnLine! (HH:MM:SS)
   frequency
       is the number of days until OnLine! should be run again
   switches
       are any optional switches to pass to OnLine!

For example, if you want DISK_PAK OnLine! to run on the root disk (":") at 2:00 a.m. every Saturday beginning June 1, write any output to the file :ONLINE.LS, and stop by 4 a.m. (if it has not already completed), you would use the command:

       batch_online : 1-Jun-96 2:00 7 /l=:online.ls/ru=120

The BATCH_ONLINE.CLI macro also accepts two switches from the user.

The /STREAMS=n switch is used to create the ONLINE batch queue with "n" streams, allowing "n" copies of DISK_PAK OnLine! to run concurrently. By default, "n" is 1. Before submitting the first DISK_PAK OnLine! job, you must create the queue with the "BATCH_ONLINE/STREAMS" command.

The /Q switch allows you to see what requests are currently in the ONLINE queue. The "Jobname" field shows which LDU each request is to optimize. The "After" field shows when the request will run. To allow for correct synchronization, requests scheduled to run on following days will show a time of "0:00:00". At that time, the request will re-submit itself to run at the specified time later that day, and again the specified number of days later.

This enhancement is included in Revision 02.03.02 of DISK_PAK OnLine!, that was mailed in mid-May. If you have any questions regarding this upgrade or other product issues, call EAGLE support at 913-823-7257.

Streamline your electronic office with MAID for CEO

You're working away, finishing that report the boss wanted. You have worked on this for days, maybe weeks, and it is perfect. You glance at your watch -- 3 p.m. You still have some time before the boss leaves at 5 p.m. So, you go through your mail, catch up on some things, and meander toward your bosses office about 4:15 p.m.

"She's already gone," the boss' secretary says. "She said she was going to send you a CEO message and let you know she had to leave at 4 p.m., but she'd like a copy of your report to take with her."

Too late! You missed the message, and your report missed its chance for today.

This whole scenario could have been avoided with a little housecleaning and help from MAID for CEO.

MAID for CEO is an integrated set of nine utilities from EAGLE, designed to streamline electronic office functions on Data General's CEO (Comprehensive Electronic Office). Messenger, which is one element of MAID for CEO, sends CEO reminders and notification of mail to users' consoles when they are not in the CEO environment, avoiding late reports or overlooked meetings.

Sweeper is another part of MAID for CEO that helps keep your CEO environment cleaned up. Sweeper finds extraneous or unnecessary files in the subdirectories of CEO's filing directory that may be wasting valuable disk blocks. Sweeper provides an easy method to eliminate these files and free up the disk space.

Other utilities that are a part of MAID for CEO include:
ACCELERATOR - rebuilds INFOS database used by CEO in one easy step, reducing wasted space by as much as 75 percent and improving processing speed.
RELOCATOR - finds CEO drawers no longer owned by the user who created them, and returns drawers to their rightful owners.