This document describes changes made to the latest release of the Apple Workgroup Server 95 system software, A/UX 3.1. You must be running A/UX 3.1 to install this software. If you are running an earlier version, call Apple at 1-800-769-2775, Ext. 7822, to order the AWS 95 Software Upgrade. After installing A/UX 3.1, then you can install this Tune-Up.
NOTES ON INSTALLING THE TUNE-UP
Installation takes approximately 5 minutes. The installer's on-screen messages will guide you through the installation process. You will be required to restart your system after the installation has completed, so be sure to prepare any clients ahead of time for a service interruption.
IMPROVEMENTS
Application support
Ñ Use of Timbuktu Pro's TCP/IP connection method no longer causes the A/UX Macintosh environment to hang.
Ñ A problem which caused AppleSearch indexing to fail under heavy load has been corrected.
Ñ Colour Central no longer hangs under heavy load.
Ñ BeHierarchic and NowMenus no longer cause hangs or crashes of the Mac environment.
AppleTalk
Ñ Routerless nets where the systems have unique network numbers but identical node numbers will no longer experience dropped packets which lead to major performance degradation.
Ñ The ADSP stack now correctly completes a read request when no data is available on a half closed session. Previously, the read request was queued which could cause applications utilizing ADSP to hang.
A/UX File Manager
Ñ The volume backup time is now correctly maintained for the virtual UNIX volume, ╘/╒.
Ñ The File Manager supports file names beginning with the bullet character, ╘Ñ╒. However, these characters were translated into dot, ╘.╒, on the UNIX filesystem to avoid a problem with the Finder interpreting files beginning with dot as drivers. A new environment variable, TBSEEDOTS, now prevents this translation. It is NOT set by default.
Ñ Remote NFS filesystems having a space in their name no longer cause the File Manager to become confused.
Ñ Unrecoverable disk read errors no longer cause the entire Mac environment to crash.
Ñ Random failures during Finder copies and saving from applications to the server have been eliminated.
Ñ The performance when extending the resource fork of an AppleSingle file on the UNIX filesystem has been improved dramatically. Currently if this occurred during a save of a large file (via an arbitrary application), it could take up to 3 times longer to save the file than normal. There should now be no measurable difference between a normal save and one that happens to extend the resource fork.
Ñ A problem that caused save's from applications to fail with the message, 'File couldn't be saved because it couldn't be found' has been eliminated.
Ñ The creator of the file /etc/fstab has been changed to TextEditor's signature.
Ñ A 'find' of file or folder names that contain accented vowels (or other diacriticals) now works properly.
A/UX Kernel
Ñ The A/UX kernel no longer panics if more than four Ethernet interfaces are installed.
Ñ The console emulator no longer hangs if you stop <CTRL-S> the output.
Ñ A kernel bus error, which could occur under heavy file I/O, has been corrected.
Ñ Certain I/O operations no longer cause the kernel fault handler to panic the system.
Ñ The FIONREAD ioctl no longer causes the system to hang when issued from a background process.
Ñ A problem which caused the kernel╒s asynchronous I/O data structures to become corrupted has been fixed.
Ñ NFS now maps client user IDs greater than 65533 to the anonymous user, "nobody".
UNIX Printing
Ñ Lpr(1) now prints correctly via AppleTalk to the LaserWriter 810.
Ñ The lpr(1) back-end utility for PostScript printing is now enscript(1). Therefore, lpr(1) now supports eight-bit characters and the Grave character, `, on all LaserWriters.
UNIX File Locking
Ñ A problem which prevented the lock daemon from detecting contention between a process running on the server and a process running on the client has been corrected.
Ñ The lock daemon, rpc.lockd, no longer fails after a connection timeout with the status monitor on another machine.
Ñ Previously, on a system with NFS configured, some signals were ignored while a process was waiting on a lock.
Ñ The lock daemon now supports version 3 of the lock protocol for PC-NFS clients.
Other UNIX Utilities
Ñ The shutdown(1m) command no longer complains about RPC port mapper failures.
Ñ The default rotational delay set by newfs(1m) is now zero microseconds.
Ñ Previously, if you aborted an FTP connection to stop a transfer, the A/UX FTP server would shut down the control connection and the session would be lost.
Ñ The 'cron' daemon no longer crashes after running 17576 jobs.
Ñ The status daemon, rpc.statd, will now continue to operate when it cannot re-establish connections with other servers after a crash.
Of Interest to Developers
Ñ The pap_write routine in the PAP server library now functions correctly.
Ñ A process which blocks SIGALRM and then calls the sleep(3) function, no longer sleeps forever.
Ñ The POSIX library, /lib/libposix.a, now includes versions of the lstat and fstat system calls which reference the POSIX-compliant stat structure.
Ñ The strftime routine no longer hangs when called.
Ñ For improved security, the gethostbyaddr routine now cross-checks information in the host databases.
Miscellaneous
Ñ Under A/UX 3.1, if Password Checking is turned on in A/UX Startup, the MacPartition (boot volume) is hidden from all users, including the super-user. This has been corrected; the super-user (root) can always see the MacPartition.
Ñ The new 250MB, 500MB, and 2GB SCSI drives are now listed in /etc/disktab.
Ñ The system date spontaneously changing to sometime in 2017 has been eliminated, along with the problem of Restrospect scripts calculating next execution times for a date and time in 2017.
Ñ A system crash/hang could occur when using a remote client to open a FileMaker database that was represented by an 'alias', but that did not exist. This has been eliminated.
Ñ The 'catsearchd' now uses roughly 15% less memory and finishes the initial scan at system startup in approximately 20% less time.
