|
|
| Author |
Message |
nephi
|
|
To Do Lists
| 
Mar 25 07:42 UTC 1995 |
Hi. You are member of staff. You are planning to do things with
this system. What things are you planning to do? In what order are
you planning to do them? When do you think they will be started and
completed?
What? You are not a staff member? What are your comments on the
"To Do" lists of the staff members?
|
| 65 responses total. |
carl
|
|
response 1 of 65:
|
Mar 25 12:01 UTC 1995 |
I'm in the midst of rewriting Grex's hypertext. I also maintain
some system files and help in special projects such as the JCC
sale.
I hope to have the hypertext ready in the next week or two.
Homework is keeping me busier than anticipated.
|
remmers
|
|
response 2 of 65:
|
Mar 25 13:17 UTC 1995 |
For the benefit of the new cfadm trainees, I updated my cfadm tutorial.
It's in /home/remmers/cfadm-tutor.txt.
|
popcorn
|
|
response 3 of 65:
|
Mar 25 14:18 UTC 1995 |
I've installed various programs on the system (elm, pine, party, write,
pico, joe, irc, mesg, menu, figlet, etc.), written a handful of programs
and scripts (mathom, filebrowse, recipe, gloria, etc.), I answer lots of
the mail that's sent to staff/sysop/help/info/admin/etc., and I maintain
Grex's birthday list. Also, like other staffers, I keep after the overly
big files in the mail spool, moving those to users' home directories so
that the mail spool doesn't fill up.
Some of the things I can think of that are on my To Do list:
* Finish re-starting the info conference. (Yeah, right.)
* Write a simple "help" command that offers you a list of Grex
documentation to look at. (This is a temporary stand-in until the
hypertext help pages are ready.)
* Stick a "wrapper" around party, to display various messages to the user
before starting running party. Once that's done, I may go looking for
someone else to be the party maintainer.
* Put a new copy of gnu "test" on Grex, for use by the party wrapper.
|
robh
|
|
response 4 of 65:
|
Mar 26 00:44 UTC 1995 |
What does "test" do? Or is that "tset"?
|
davel
|
|
response 5 of 65:
|
Mar 26 02:54 UTC 1995 |
test is the command that allows conditional execution in shell scripts.
I believe that sh has its own builtin test command; I gather that csh
uses an external program. The [ ... ] notation (at least in sh) is
supposed to be the same as test.
Why is a new version needed, Valerie? (just curious)
|
srw
|
|
response 6 of 65:
|
Mar 26 19:36 UTC 1995 |
I am also a staff member, but I don't seem to accomplish much.
I mostly answer questions sent to staff, help users with access problems,
delete accounts, clean up mail. Valerie is usually quicker at getting
to most of these things than I am, but she leaves some for me to do.
I also have installed software on Grex, although I don't have anywhere
near the time to spend on it that I need. I know a lot about programming,
but just enough about the inside of a Unix operating system's day to day
administration to make the hard-core staff nervous.
I mostly keep them honest by asking occasionally embarrassing questions.
There are a few other staffers who may be too busy actually accomplishing
things to be checking and responding here. Here is a list of some of the
projects others are working on at the moment:
We are looking at ways to improve the stability of gryps, or FreeBSD router.
There is a rebuild of httpd to restore our www service.
Someone is out there buying more RAM for Grex, because we are running
(partly) on borrowed RAM at the moment.
We have acquired some new modems to put on our two new dialup lines.
The two we tried to put on them were intransigent and are being saved
for some other project. We need to buy three more, add 3 lines from Ameritech,
and configure Grex to acknowledge them all. This is ongoing.
The process has begun to acquire a Sparc CPU. Negotiations are taking place,
and I hope we can soon announce that we have it. We already have the
Sun box to put it in. We still need a disk for it. Then we will begin the
long process of setting up a parallel SParc-based Grex. A lot of staff
time will have to go into this process.
I am sure there are other things going on, too. I can't assign dates to
any of these, because it's all a volunteer effort. I can assure you that
the staff wants these things as much as the rest of you.
No one is really working on Usenet or improving the internet access, because
we don't have enough money to fund these. When staff time becomes a little
more available, we might consider a funddraiser, though.
|
carl
|
|
response 7 of 65:
|
Mar 27 00:07 UTC 1995 |
_I_ didn't tell you this, but a couple of the processes mentioned
above may have been further along than Steve knew at the time.
|
janc
|
|
response 8 of 65:
|
Mar 27 05:18 UTC 1995 |
I'm not a staff member, but I do stuff anyway. A bunch of mods to party
just got installed, and I have just completed mods to write. The write
stuff includes a write-the-same-person-again command "write ." and a
facility that allows users to accept only normal writes, only telegrams,
or both, and a facility that allows a user to designate if he is to be
written in character mode or line mode, plus some more boring internal
changes. Probably I've also installed a fresh patch of bugs. I'll down-
load the source, and let the real staff people worry about what, if any
of this they care to install.
|
lilmo
|
|
response 9 of 65:
|
Mar 27 06:26 UTC 1995 |
> Probably I've also installed a fresh patch of bugs.
Ah... refreshing honoesty from a programmer... *grin*
|
janc
|
|
response 10 of 65:
|
Mar 27 07:34 UTC 1995 |
Just remembered that the virtuous souls here at Grex have resisted the
temptation of telegrams so far. All praise to you. I suggest you ignore
the new write version, since most of the new stuff is telegram related and
the things are fundamentally disgusting.
|
mdw
|
|
response 11 of 65:
|
Mar 27 07:42 UTC 1995 |
Unfortunately, the virtuous souls also grudgingly agreed that
if a version of write materialized that supported split
write/telegram permissions, they'd consider installing such
a beast, little suspecting anyone would ever be nutty enough
to actually implement said changes. So, it's likely said
changes will happen...
|
srw
|
|
response 12 of 65:
|
Mar 27 08:21 UTC 1995 |
This just in...memory and CPU card are now in staff's possession.
To Do: Install same.
It should be on someone's to do list to call Ameritech to add 3 lines
to the hunt group. I suspect that that could either be a staff member
or our treasurer, Danr.
|
robh
|
|
response 13 of 65:
|
Mar 27 11:31 UTC 1995 |
Imagine my surprise when I ran w and saw:
chelsea ttyh8 6:14am 20 11 more
^^^^^
Have the lines been added already, or did someone just swap
the existing ones to a different tty?
|
chelsea
|
|
response 14 of 65:
|
Mar 27 11:40 UTC 1995 |
They're here! Type "phones", minus the quotes, for the numbers.
|
popcorn
|
|
response 15 of 65:
|
Mar 27 15:47 UTC 1995 |
Re 5: The version of test we're running is the built-in Sun version.
Our manual page for test is for the gnu version. I'm not exactly
sure what the Sun version supports (maybe I should go look for the
other manual page) but I want to be able to say "if this file is older
than that file, then do X". The Gnu test can handle that. I dunno if
the Sun version can, but if it does, it doesn't work the same way as
the Gnu version does. I figure the easiest fix is to get the gnu version
working here.
Re 8: I'm not sure it's clear from what he's saying, but Jan *wrote*
party and the versions of write, mesg, and some other commands, that are
running on Grex.
Re 12: Gregc is going to call Ameritech to turn on the other phone lines.
Re 13: Some of both. We're now running on 8 phone lines (we've been
paying for 8 lines since the move; Greg got the other two working this
weekend), *and* the lines have been swapped around some, so ttyh2 and
ttyh3 aren't currently in use, but now ttyh8 and ttyh9 are.
|
srw
|
|
response 16 of 65:
|
Mar 27 16:32 UTC 1995 |
Thanks for the update, Valerie. Thanks to the board for approving the
purchase of the new modems. Valerie and some other staffers put a
whole buch of time in to try to get our other modems to work as dialin
modems. If this had worked it would have saved $$, but it didn't.
Once we bought the proper equipment, it didn't take long.
Thanks to Gregc for the quick work.
It will be interesting to watch the usage of our expanded hunt group.
|
gregc
|
|
response 17 of 65:
|
Mar 27 16:51 UTC 1995 |
Just to reiterate an earlier point to prevent confusion:
In #12 above Steve W. said:
This just in...memory and CPU card are now in staff's possession.
To Do: Install same.
Yes, we have the new CPU, but we can't just install it. We are running a
68020 right now, and the new processor is a Sparc. It is not software
compatible. A new machine needs to be assembled, a disk drive purchased,
a new version of SunOS installed, and then all the software currently
being used on Grex will have to be ported to the new machine. This will
happen over the next several months. So, please, do not plant the idea
in everyone's head that they will suddenly see a speed increase.
|
ajax
|
|
response 18 of 65:
|
Mar 27 17:41 UTC 1995 |
Regarding tel, its installation seems uncontroversial if there are
separate tel/write permissions, and the default tel permission is
off. I think the controversy will be if people want the default
permission on...hopefully the board would decide that one.
|
nephi
|
|
response 19 of 65:
|
Mar 28 02:47 UTC 1995 |
Wonderful! I've been waiting for tel. Thanks Jan!
|
srw
|
|
response 20 of 65:
|
Mar 28 06:14 UTC 1995 |
Sorry about #12. No confusion intended. Installing the cpu will take place
in another box, and then the porting begins. It will take months.
By contrast, the memory was installed on Grex in today's maintenance.
We're temporarily running on 128MB, but will drop back to 96MB.
|
steve
|
|
response 21 of 65:
|
Mar 28 06:40 UTC 1995 |
We're now running with 128M of memory.
We got two 32M memory cards for $350 each, because they were so
cheap. One of these little beauties is mdw's, so we're gonna have
to give it back when his machine comes up. So, for our SPARC project,
we have the Sun-4/200 card, and I just ordered the SCSI controller
today for $100. The last one we got was $150. Because of all these
price decreases, we elected to get a third 32M memory card for Grex.
Because we've been swapping lately, and that affectes everything when
we do so, getting rid of, or reducing the amount of swapping activity
is the single most important thing to speed up the system.
I've also ordered a Sun-4/200 CPU for mdw's machine too, in that
same order for our SCSI card. They should be in probably next Monday.
|
selena
|
|
response 22 of 65:
|
Apr 4 17:28 UTC 1995 |
tel rules. I just dunno if it'd be any good, if everyone's is
normally turned off.
|
nephi
|
|
response 23 of 65:
|
Apr 5 04:33 UTC 1995 |
How much memory are we running on now? 128 or 96?
|
srw
|
|
response 24 of 65:
|
Apr 5 05:36 UTC 1995 |
128Mb
|