From dinah@lgc.com Wed May 8 12:15:16 1991 Sender: lug-nuts-relay@karazm.math.uh.edu From: dinah@lgc.com Return-Path: Date: Wed, 8 May 91 09:17:22 CDT To: lug-nuts@sug.org Subject: May HUGS Newsletter - text version HUGS is distributed courtesy of Craig Fox and Sandefer Oil & Gas, Inc. The current HUGS is also available via anonymous ftp on titan.rice.edu as public/pug- s.ps courtesy of Mike Pearlman and Rice University. May Meeting Join us on May 14 at Birra- poretti's located at 1997 West Gray in River Oaks Center (near the intersection of Shepherd and West Gray.) Dinner is at 6:00. The program will be Dinah McNutt speaking on The Automounter. Calendar of Events May 14 HUGS Monthly Meeting 21 Hounix Monthly Meeting June 11 HUGS Monthly Meeting 10-14 USENIX - Nashville 17-19 SUG Conference (Atlanta) 2 servers, put 5 clients on each server.) Circumvent the file sys- tem if possible, i.e. access raw disk if your application allows, as many dbms's do. The choice of network physical layer should be considered care- fully. FDDI, in reality, only in- creases NFS speeds by about a factor of 2. In tuning a network look at the number of nfsd's, MAXUSERS, and use nfsstat and nfswatch to find out how your network is performing, where problems might be. Programmers can make their ap- plications run faster by using - O4 and -fast compiler switches. Beware: -O4 does not work for device drivers (loop counters in registers are ignored) and IEEE floating point precision may be degraded. Profile code and find out where the application spends the most time--use assembly to speed those parts up if neces- sary. Use dynamic linking. Third parties (Interphase, Lega- to) offer NFS accelerators. Other NFS improvements come from increasing MAXUSERS to greater than 64 and decrease blocks of data to 4K. Optimize the number of biod's, especially if socket overflows are a prob- lem. Reduce the number of sym- bolic links. Look at the number of NBUFS in the kernel (buffer cache buffers). It should be 112 for a system with more than 4 disks and 64 for a system with less than 4 disks. Do not increase NBUFS to more than 112 since Sun has gotten some funky er- rors by trying that. Pat made his notes and some re- lated papers available to all who wanted to copy them. Contact Pat at the local Sun office if you are interested. at the Sun office if you are interested. And don't forget to send your dues if you haven't paid since Sept. 1990. Respectfully submitted, Lynne van Arsdale What is the Sun User Group? by Peter H. Salus, Exec- utive Director o Technical Conferences o Annual Exhibit o Donated Software Distribu- tion o README Newsletter o Local User Group Support o Newsgroup comp.org.sug Sun User Group, Inc. Suite 315 1330 Beacon Street Brookline, MA 02146 USA office@sug.org The Sun User Group, Inc., is an international not-for-profit technical and professional as- sociation. Our members are us- ers, manufacturers, and re- sellers of hardware and soft- ware either produced or licensed by Sun Microsystems, or which expands or enhances the capabilities of such equip- ment. The Sun User Group en- courages communication of in- novative research and develop- ment of technology through its conferences, exhibits and pub- lications. The Sun User Group also serves as a distribution point for contributed software in tape and CD ROM formats. The Sun User Group is incor- porated in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts as a not-for- profit, educational organiza- tion. Membership is o open to all interested individ- uals o only $40.00 (US) per year (International postage $15 extra) Members receive: o Discounts on Conference registrations o Right to purchase contrib- uted software o Quarterly newsletter README o Local Group support Conferences The Sun User Group sponsors two conferences per year, in June and in December. The De- cember Conference has a large vendor exhibit. Each Confer- ence features a day of tutorials and several days of technical sessions. The conferences are attended by members from around the world: the 1990 Conference in San Jose was at- tended by over 4000 individu- als from 22 countries, plus 43 of the fifty United States and the District of Columbia. Forthcoming conferences are: Atlanta, GA, June 17-19, 1991 San Jose, CA, December 7-10, 1991 Washington, DC, June 1992 San Jose, CA, December 1992 The Sun User Group is dedi- cated to keeping in the fore- front of Sun and Sun-licensed technology. The tutorials re- flect the changing interests and demands of our technical and professional members. Software Library The Sun User Group makes available public domain (un- supported, donated) software. In the past, there have been software tapes; in 1991, keep- ing in the technological fore- front, SUG is issuing a CD- ROM. Send email for further information. README Newsletter The Sun User Group publishes a quarterly newsletter, contain- ing useful articles; User Group news; and Sun Microsystems and third-party vendor infor- mation. Submissions are en- couraged, and may be sent to readme@sug.org . 1990 issues included articles concerning Su- peruser Privileges and about Do- mains and Networks. Local User Groups One of the ways of getting to know your colleagues is through a local user group. Local User Groups (LUGs) exist throughout the world. Currently, there are LUGs in 29 states and 18 coun- tries. The Sun User Group sup- ports these local groups with list- ings, literature, a mailing list (LUG-NUTS), and organization- al assistance. Several internation- al LUGs have entered into formal arrangements with the Sun User Group to ensure that their mem- bers receive README and other benefits. Get involved with your local user group. Organization The Sun User Group is governed by a Board of Directors, each of whom serves a three-year term. The 1991 Board members are: Bim Toth, President (Harvard Univ.) Doug Kingston, Vice-President (Morgan Stanley) Dinah McNutt, Secretary , Tech- nology Transfer Associates Barry Shein, Treasurer , Soft- ware Tool & Die Stan Hanks, Technology Trans- fer Associates Bill LeFebvre, Northwestern Univ. Rich Morin, Canta Forda Com- puter Lab. Frode Odegard, Veda Technolo- gies, Inc. Mark Seiden, Seiden & Associ- ates Tom Stapleton Young Minds, Inc. CD-ROM is causing a revolution in software distribution for the UNIX workstation market. The current leading media, magnetic tape, is being discarded by compa- nies such as Sun Microsystems, Hewlett Packard, Intergraph, DEC, IBM, etc. in favor of CD-ROMs. To encourage their customer base to acquire CD-ROM drives, a vari- ety of programs have been insti- tuted, which include bundling drives with most server models and developer systems or offering a drive free with a software sup- port contract. Other programs pro- vide incentives to purchase a drive by simply lowering prices for CD- ROM based software distribu- tions. Note that one CD-ROM drive on an NFS network will give every- one access to the CD-ROMS. Companies such as SCO, Interac- tive, NeXT, Apollo, Silicon Graphics, Data General, Motoro- la, AT&T and others have ISO 9660 CD-ROM drivers available and are formulating their own CD-ROM strategies. To date, Sun Microsystems is by far the most aggressive pursuer of CD-ROM; almost every SPARCstation net- work has access to at least one SunCD drive. Why The Shift To CD-ROMS? The potential savings are huge. The break-even point for replicat- ing 60 MB quarter-inch cartridge (QIC) tapes versus CD-ROM is just 50 copies. At 1000 disc cop- ies, media reproduction savings for CD-ROM compared to QIC tapes can exceed $20,000. Cost Of CD-ROM Reproduction The cost of disc reproduction is currently $1.30 to $2 with master- ing charges ranging between $800 and $2100. Prices depend upon turn around time and quantity of discs replicated along with other variables. The mastering facilities usually include two color art on the CD and a plastic jewel box at no extra charge. (Mastering is the creation of a metal mold that is used in replicating discs.) Aside from being inexpensive, the media is reliable, durable, high capacity (680MB), light and randomly accessible. Mean- while, CD-ROM mastering and replication costs are becoming lower due to the excess capacity that exists in the CD Audio plants where the CD-ROMs are pressed. The ROCK RIDGE Interchange Protocols In March 1991, 16 companies an- nounced support for the ROCK RIDGE Interchange Protocols, a framework for adding POSIX support to the international CD- ROM standard ISO 9660. With- out breaking the standard in any way, Rock Ridge allows Unix ap- plications and other operating systems' applications to run di- rectly off the disc without the need for modification of any files. The National Institute of Stan- dards and Technology (NIST) is currently reviewing the exten- sions for inclusion in a Federal In- formation Processing Standard (FIPS). Simultaneously, the ma- jor workstation companies are adding these extensions to their CD-ROM drivers, in effect creat- ing a defacto open standard. The ISO 9660 advantage is that software publishers can deliver multiple binaries of their software on a single CD-ROM in a format that most every computer in the market has a capacity to read. Simply, CD-ROM is a software marketer's dream. How else could a digital, multimedia, software demo be possible that includes hypertext, documentation, full motion video and software bina- ries for multiple computer plat- forms on a $2 disc? Software marketers should ap- preciate the fact that CD-ROMs 680 MB capacity allows them to put multiple applications on one disc. With license management packages available from 3rd par- ties along with data encryption schemes, a publisher can maintain complete control over the use of software or information on his CD-ROM. How Simple Is It To Create A CD-ROM? A software vendor simply chooses the data set he wants on a disc and arranges it into a direc- tory structure. NFS- exported file systems may be included. Files that must be changed during exe- cution or installation of your soft- ware should be copied off the CD-ROM to a hard disk before use. Each file's new location and all references to it should be iden- tified using a reliable absolute ad- dress or specified relative to its lo- cation on the CD-ROM. After giving special attention to as- signing reasonable ownership and permissions for the files to be distributed you are ready for formatting the finalized directo- ry structure as an ISO 9660 im- age. Simple as preparing a CD- ROM is, the ISV generally needs a high level of quality control over this important pro- cess. In-house CD-ROM prepa- ration with Young Minds CD- ROM publishing software "Makedisc", achieves this ob- jective. The advantages of in- house quality control along with the speed and convenience in getting product to market can not be matched by a service bu- reau. Working with a service bureau is normally a slow and expensive process due to the verification process needed for testing the layout and format- ting of a disc. "MAKEDISC", Young Minds ISO 9660/Rock Ridge format- ting software is the ISV's core CD-ROM technology. It creates a finished CD-ROM disc image that can be sent to a CD press- ing facility on tape or other elec- tronic media for mastering and replication. A CD-ROM image can be tested before mastering by placing it in a hard disk par- tition and mounting it with the workstation's CD-ROM driver to emulate functionality of a real CD-ROM! This UNIX program offers a major advantage over MS-DOS systems in that no dedicated hardware is required. The other major advantage is that all Unix style names and symbolic links are converted to ISO 9660 for- mat automatically and can be read by Unix platforms that do not currently have their Rock Ridge drivers implemented. Makedisc solves the publisher's CD-ROM formatting night- mares with one simple to learn Unix command. YOUNG MINDS, INC., is pro- viding the Unix-based CD- ROM formatting software used by the majority of the Unix ISV's and Unix computer com- panies creating CD-ROMs to- day. Today, most ISO 9660 CD- ROMs distributed in the Unix market are formatted using Young Minds software. A partial client list in- cludes Highland Software, LSI Logic, NeXT, Hewlett Packard, Tiger Media, McDonnell Dou- glas, Island Graphics, Harvard University, U.C Berkeley, Inter- leaf, JPL, CALS, NIST, Com- puter Signal and Sony, along with other major universities, Unix workstation manufacturers and ISV's. "Makedisc" is en- abling the Unix CD-ROM soft- ware distribution revolution to happen. "Makedisc" runs on all Sun workstations and on most other major Unix platforms including Hewlett Packard HP/UX(TM), 88open(TM), Apollo Do- main(TM), DEC Ultrix(TM), NeXT(TM) and IBM RS/ 6000(TM). The list price is $6995. Remarkably, replacing just one 400 QIC tape distribution with CD-ROMs pays for the Makedisc software, software support and the complete manufacturing and mastering costs for the 400 CD- ROMs!!! Young Minds, Inc. was formed two years ago specifically to meet the needs of the Unix CD- ROM market, producing the first Unix ISO 9660 CD-ROM with the introduction of the Free Soft- ware Foundations GNU and MIT's X Window source code on disc. Today, products include CD Write Once devices for Sun workstations and full text index- ing and retrieval software for OPENLOOK, Motif and Sun- View. Future products being de- veloped include Multiplatform MultiMedia(TM) CD-ROM au- thoring software for Hypermedia application. End users will be able to gain access to text, graph- ics, audio and full motion video >from a CD-ROM with software only. For further information contact: Young Minds, Incorporated Tom Stapleton Phone: 714-335-1350 Fax: 714-798-0488 E-mail: yngmnds!stapltn@ucr- math.ucr.edu Paid advertisement In This Issue o SUG CD-ROM Project o CD-ROM Technology o HUGS Who's Who List o What is SUG? o SUG June Conference Volume 3 No. 4 May 1991 A User-Community Publication The following lists detail HUGS members. Anyone on the current mailing list who is not also on the "paid" list will not receive any more newsletters starting in July, 1991. Send your $10 dues to the treasurer, Lynne VanArsdale. Make checks payable to HUGS or Houston Users' Group for Suns. The address to send dues to is: 6528 Sewanee, Houston, Texas 77005. All members are encouraged to fill out and return the member in- formation form included on the last page of this newsletter. Note: Your name should appear on all three of the following lists! Paid HUGS Members Bill Baker Bob Baker Dan Blair John Brophy Stan Bujnowski A C Conrad Dan Davison Craig Fox Charles Hunt Steve Krueger Earl Manning Dinah McNutt Steve Nuchia Nell Owens Nenita T. Penalba-Hunt Tom Skerl Russell Thorstenberg Eric Townsend Lynne VanArsdale Asher Winata Jody Winston People who have returned member information form: Stan Bujnowski Bill Baker Russell Thorstenberg Asher Winata Nenita T. Panalba-Hunt Charles Jerry Hunt Jody Winston Bobbi Mooney Dan Davison, PhD Cassidy Coffari Lynne VanArsdale Michael Pearlman Dinah McNutt People who are currently on mailing list: Stan Bujnowski Bill Baker Russell Thorstenberg Asher Winata Noel Mason Shari Bosco Patricia Smith Matt Emerson Nikki Dorman John Van Bockel Nenita T. Panalba- Hunt Charles Jerry Hunt Steven D. Krueger Anthony T. Colyandro Dan Blair Earl Manning Hope Marcotte Linda Dodge Jose Barros Jody Winston Thomas Webb Jim McDougal John Hart Bobbi Mooney Bob Leader Calvin Campbell Terry Edgerton John Edgerton Ridgeway Scott J. Eric Townsend Dan Davison, PhD Bert Bras Saiyid Z. Kamal Steve Nuchia George W. Jolly Jim Carson Ted Cruise Tom Skerl Dave Shehorn Bill Dittman Herman Lee Curtis Owens Bob Keathley Richard Hunter Ken Skinner Pat Shuff Nell Owens Gary Crouse Sally Boyd Louis Smith Stan Hanks Dinah Anderson Gil Hilman Pradip Jain Michael Zeitlin Lyle Meir Richard Deering Roman Rammler Jim Spitzer George Slater Alfred D. Johnson Stephen P. Gregas, Jr. David J. Brown Cassidy Coffari Dan Nagala Robert Rundle A.C. Conrad Anthony Baldassarre Don Larson John Brophy Amir Ilbeig Kevin Stroud Michael E. Payne Chen Sun George Farmer Russell Gray N. Rao Linga Wayne Smith Jim Pentico Dick Hatten Jenny Sheffield David Rosen Carl Rose David Sikora Russell Cooper Lynne Alexander Craig Fox Bob Marcum Jan Gerday Harlan Evans Chuck Bentley Sam Caronna Mike Dunn CD-ROM SW Distribution, continued from page 1 Continued on page 3 CD-ROM Technology HUGS The Newsletter of the Houston Users' Group for Suns Are You on the HUGS Who's Who List? SUG Technical Conference SPARC: Hardware and Software ATLANTA HILTON & TOWERS JUNE 17-19, 1991 TUTORIALS: Tutorials run all day June 17 $195.00 per person in addition to conference fees (box lunch in- cluded) (These tutorials each last the full day) T1 - Writing Distributed Appli- cations using the ONC Platform Instructor: John Corbin, Univer- sity of Texas-El Paso and Sun Microsystems T2 - Basic X Concepts Instruc- tor: Berry Kercheval, Intelligent Decisions T3 - Introduction to the Domain Name System Instructor: Bill LeFebvre, Northwestern Uni- versity T4 - Mixed-OS Administration; or, VMS+UNIX=Oil+Water? Instructor: Ruth Milner, NRAO/ VLA TECHNICAL SESSIONS: Tuesday & Wednesday, June 18 & 19 Sessions will consist of Key- notes, Panel Discussions and three tracks of papers represent- ing: o SPARC compatibles and peripherals o Technical papers o Sun engineers and developers Please call +415/336-4341 for additional conference informa- tion. Continued on page 2 Availability of papers >from Pat's April talk: The papers Pat mentioned in his talk (see minutes for more infor- mation) are now available via anonymous ftp from titan in the directory ~ftp/public/hugs/ sun.[1-7].Z. Thank-you Mike Pearlman and Rice University for making these available. Who's who,continued from page 1 CD-ROM SW Distribution, continued from page 1 President Eric Townsend University of Houston % 749-2120 - jet@uh.edu Vice President/Program Chair Dan Davison University of Houston % 794-0531 - dbd@bchs.uh.edu Secretary/Treasurer Lynne Van Arsdale GeoQuest Systems, Inc. % 952-2100 - uunet!xcetera!lynne Newsletter Editor Dinah Anderson Technology Transfer Associates % 683-5792 - dinah@sug.org SUG Focal A.C. Conrad MenilFoundation % 525-9451 - acc@rice.edu HUGS Officers Continued on page 4 Eric Townsend began the meeting at around 7:10 p.m. About 20 peo- ple attended. Everyone intro- duced themselves to the group. SUG CDROM project: Dinah announced the CD-athon taking place April 20 and 21 at the Dublin Group office building. She received approval from the SUG board to give free SUG CD's to all who participate in the making of software for the CD. Treasurer's report: Checking account contains $492.70. We will not file a form 990 with the IRS this year since we took in less than $25,000 this year and they did not send us a form (if they had sent us a form, we would have had to fill it out). Don't forget to send your dues if you haven't paid since Sept. 1990. Newsletter: IWL has purchased ads for 3 months in a row. To insure that you will continue to receive a newsletter, fill out a directory form and mail it to Lynne Va- nArsdale, 6528 Sewanee, Hous- ton, Tx. 77005 (lav@geoquest.- com). Lynne apologized for not updating the US mail address da- tabase used for newsletter mail- ings. The email connection to Craig Fox who is mailing out the newsletters is broken. Hopefully the database will be updated by the mailing of the May newsletter. Newsletter:Please send stuff for the newsletter. Focal:Nothing this month. Speakers: May-Advanced Soft- ware Automation and Hindsight will talk about a C decompiler. June-Jim Emmons, GeoQuest Systems, Inc. will speak about moving to X in the Sun environ- ment. If you are interested in becoming program coordinator, please talk with Dan. We need someone to volunteer for next year (starting August 1991). Other Stuff: SUG board: The Brookline office is being set up. SUG is applying for non-profit status. The summer conference will be in Atlanta, June 17-19. It will be a technical conference (read "no exhibits") and the focus will be on SPARC. Speaker: Pat Shuff talked about NFS accel- eration and tuning your net- worked system and network. His focus was on how to use what you have and make it work better without spending money. He fo- cused on 5 areas: users, system, disk, network, and applications. In considering users, calculate re- sources and distribute applica- tions. Get a rough estimate of the number of NFS operations being performed and what it would take to overload the network. Do ev- erything with shared memory if possible. Distribute jobs to ma- chines best suited to perform the particular activity (graphics accel- erators, database machines, etc.). Determine the bottleneck and try to offload it. He reminded us that 4.0 and its derivatives need a pmeg patch that cures a problem with context switching. Running the system without the patch causes swap- ping problems and requires that the paging table be recalculated more than necessary. SunOS 4.1.1 fixes the problem. Disk type also bears on perfor- mance. IPI disks were designed to serve large files and database- type applications. SCSI disks were designed to serve smaller files. Try to distribute the number of disks on a machine. Synchro- nous SCSI will be about 4 times faster than asynchronous because it does not spend a lot of time seeking. Put swap space evenly on all disks. (If you have 10 clients and April 9, 1991 HUGS Minutes Minutes Member Information Name ________________________________________________________________________ Place of Employment ____________________________________________________________ Preferred Mailing Address ________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________ Telephone Number(s) ____________________________________________________________ Electronic Mail address ___________________________________________________________ Additional information (Other memberships, areas of expertise, etc.) ________________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________________ Note: Submission of this information to HUGS is for inclusion in the HUGS membership directory. Please omit any information that you do not wish to have distributed to other HUGS members. This directory is meant for the private use of HUGS members only. Mail Form to: Lynne Alexander Van Arsdale 6528 Sewanee Street Houston, TX 77005 HUGS Houston Users' Group for Suns