home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search
- Path: sparky!uunet!wupost!usc!noiro.acs.uci.edu!cerritos.edu!ttank!karl
- Newsgroups: comp.unix.sysv386
- Subject: Re: Dell SVR4 and Postscript ANSWER (from the NET of course)
- Message-ID: <1992Jul24.051353.3445@ttank.ttank.com>
- From: karl@ttank.ttank.com (Karl Bunch)
- Date: Fri, 24 Jul 1992 05:13:53 GMT
- References: <f8cmmkp@dixie.com> <1992Jul23.161440.19562@holos0.uucp>
- Distribution: na
- Organization: Think Tank Software, Norwalk, CA
- Lines: 69
-
- In <1992Jul23.161440.19562@holos0.uucp> fsg@holos0.uucp (Frank Glass) writes:
-
- >Two questions:
-
- >1. Why didn't you expect the answer to come from HP rather than Dell?
- >It seems that if you purchase pieces from two different sources you should
- >expect to have difficulty with interface problems with possibly nowhere to
- >turn. As has been pointed out, this is what VARS and dealers are for.
-
- HP would have not even had the faintest guess. I would be supprised
- if the Unix support group couldn't have helped in this situation. I for
- one got a very quick reply when I described the problem in email to
- support@dell.com. They basicly said "maybe next release it'll be fixed".
- So I surrendered and worked around it.
-
- One VERY basic difference between me and a lot of people is I will
- spend a great deal of time thinking it's something wrong with MY
- end of the set-up. And as such I just took the whole problem apart
- until I found the "smallest" part. And that was postio!
-
- >2. Where _is_ the behavior of postio and related programs documented?
- >In our $1000 or so worth of SYSV documentation from NCR, AT&T and others
- >I haven't found documentation. I ended up writing code from scratch to
- >get a postscript printer to run across a network using a named pipe to
- >capture the output of postio. A real kludge born of lack of documentation.
-
- UNIX SYSTEM V RELEASE 4
- User's Reference Manual
- ISBN 0-13-947037-9
- postio(1)
-
- Granted this is only a few "man" pages. But, I know entire re-writes
- of programs have been done with less. ;-)
-
- BTW someone suggested using the -q option to stop "asking" for
- status messages from the printer. I tried this and as far as I can
- tell postio ALWAYS asks for a status before sending the Job. So it
- would just loop.
-
- Also, please don't underestimate the usefulness of truss(1). This was
- very helpful in figuring out what postio was doing. Not to mention I
- binary patched getty to reset in 10 seconds on a bi-directional line
- instead of the default 60. And there was the patch to mousemgr to
- ignore the return of the ioctl(fd, TCMOUSE, 1) so I could use my
- mouse on a Digiboard 16/Xi port instead of the sio driven Com1 port.
- And a change to libc.so.1 so that ttyname would work as advertised in
- the manual (use /etc/ttysrch etc.) etc. etc....
-
- All the problems I've had with Dell unix have been graciously responed
- to by support@dell.com even after more than 6 months after I purchased
- the system.
-
- It's important to make the whole situation a "team" event. Be helpful
- as much as you ask for help. If you have 10 years of Unix experiance
- spell everything out to the n-th detail so the other people understand
- the entire picture. STOP WORKING FROM US -VS- THEM. Or else, you'll
- get angry people wanting to find a way to PIN THE BLAME on you.
-
- Good Luck,
- Karl
-
- BTW if there is sufficient interest I'll post my kpostio program
- that I used to fix this situation. It's written in perl, and I'll
- have to clean it up a bit. ;-)
- --
- % ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
- % Karl Bunch ||| UUCP: ..!uunet!cerritos.edu!ttank!karl
- % Think Tank Software ||| INTERNET: karl@ttank.com
- % 42.5% of all quoted statistics are made up, of those 23.185% are right. :-)
-