response 254 of 870:

Jan 6 14:35 UTC 2005

<twenex muscles in>

Generally speaking, I would advise against linking new versions of programs
(in the sense that vim is a new version of vi, gnu tar a new version of tar)
to the names of the old ones unless the new version provides functionality as 
near as dammit identical to the old one when called as such.

(On a related note: a lot of "easy to use" Linux systems alias "cp" to "cp -i",
"rm" to "rm -i", and so on. If this applies to any grexer, I would advise them 
to realias them back to their default "values". Not doing so runs the risk of
coming to a system  where they are NOT aliased and accidentally deleting
crucial files because you expected the system to ask you if you /really/ wanted
to do that, but it didn't. At first I used to disdain aliases for this reason,
but then I hit upon the following strategy:

Say I type "ls -F" often enough that it becomes a pain to have to type it all
the time, especially since i never use "ls" on its own. So I create an alias
based on ls which gives a clue as to the extra flags, such as "lsf". That's
a simple example, but with longer commands it could be quite useful.

Unless you know your system well, it's a pain to have to find the file where
the distributors have aliased all the commands, and you run the risk of having
to do it again when you upgrade. So just type, for example:

alias ls="/path/to/ls"

in whatever .profile or .login file your shell uses (the csh syntax might 
actually be a little different). This forces the shell to look for the command
instead of replacing its behaviour with a new one. If you don't want to do 
this for all the systems and/or account you use, then just do it for root on 
those systems you have root access to. 

response 256 of 870:

Jan 6 15:43 UTC 2005

I  was able to telnet in just now but dialin does not work:telnetd:  all
Network ports in use.   ...
Followed a few seconds later by NO CARRIER.    
Twice.
There is considerable telnet lag.   There was no wait when I telnetted.

response 258 of 870:

Jan 6 15:55 UTC 2005

asd, aka 'smart' is using 97% of CPU for the past 550 minutes, running 'john'.
I will email gelinas.  Grex is still usable.   Is there some way to limit
individual users to 1 or at most 5% of CPU use?  

response 260 of 870:

Jan 6 16:07 UTC 2005

Some people may have more problems in their scripts now that we've 
moved away from a SysV UNIX to a BSD UNIX - the "usr/ucb" directory in 
a SunOS sytem is where BSD UNIX commands were put in Suns SysV OS.  
Something like the move from Korn shell scripts to bash.  Shell scripts 
using Sun's SysV commands may not work the same in BSD (or be missing 
entirely) so be aware.  

Also, there are more differences in the directory structure and the 
whole environment and deamon setup that may affect scripts written in a 
SysV system.  Better test your scripts before trusting them.

In my case (so far) I had to remove all my aliases and removed 
the '/usr/ucb' reference in two places in my .profile.  I also notice 
git is gone and without mc or git Grex is not very easy to use as file 
management is a pain without a file manager.  I'll keep playing though.

response 262 of 870:

Jan 6 17:14 UTC 2005

 re #261:  the tool you want to use is probably procmail.  you can
 pass mail off to a filter before it is ever delivered into your inbox
 and the read the mail that passes the filter with whatever MUA (mail
 user agent, aka "mail reader") you want.

 Sindi can probably tell you how to set up an elaborate system of 
 procmail rules to try to screen out spam or you can wait until staff
 have time to install a system like SpamAssassin or other anti-spam
 package and have procmail use that.

response 264 of 870:

Jan 6 17:38 UTC 2005

Set TERM to ansi. You can do this in PuTTY too.

response 266 of 870:

Jan 6 17:54 UTC 2005

Re 260: I think /usr/ucb is a Sun-ism.  It's certainly not SYSV, and the SunOS
we were running before was a BSD, pre-Solaris SunOS.

response 268 of 870:

Jan 6 23:26 UTC 2005

Party (hayz) is now splitting 98% of CPU usage with smart/asd.  Could some
staff member kindly delete both accounts?

response 270 of 870:

Jan 7 00:49 UTC 2005

 re #268:  quoting % CPU usage is not enough to establish that a user
 is abusing the system.  At the very least we'd need to know the load
 average on the system as well.  When not very much is going on it's
 not unusual for a single process or a few processes to appear to hog
 the CPU.  It doesn't necessarily mean they're starving other jobs.

response 272 of 870:

Jan 7 03:32 UTC 2005

That's 954 minutes of CPU time.  It's the cumulative amount of time 
that process has used the CPU, which is not necessarily the same as 
the amount of time since it was started.  (In fact, unless the process 
has continuously used 100% of the CPU, it will always be lower.) 
 

response 274 of 870:

Jan 7 15:22 UTC 2005

Yes /usr/ucb is a "Sun-ism".  That stands for "University of California 
at Berkeley", i.e. BSD's original "home". SunOS _is_ SysV, has been 
since I started using it in 1988.  You'll find SysV commands 
in /usr/bin and BSD commands in /usr/ucb.  You'l find the SysV 
conventional directory setup including /dev/tty??? (which is not in 
BSD). Here's a script (everytty - which lists all the ports in use by a 
particular user) which I have run on the old Sun box - it's pure SysV 
(will even work on Linux which follows SysV conventions).  It won't run 
under any BSD derivative.  It's called by "everytty username".

#!/bin/sh
 for a in `find /dev/tty[a-s]? -user $1 -print`
 do
   a=`basename $a`
   echo "
 $a:"
   ps -xt$a
 done

Sun did the /usr/ucb thing to add BSD-isms to its OS and allow users to 
choose which "flavor" they wanted to see by changing the order of their 
PATH, either putting /usr/bin or /usr/ucb first in their PATH.  Hope 
that clears things up.

response 276 of 870:

Jan 7 15:46 UTC 2005

http://www.bsdforjesus.org/