VSTa Partitions

Hi,
        thaFrom vandys@puli.cisco.com Tue Jun 20 15:22:04 1995
Received: from puli.cisco.com (puli.cisco.com [171.69.1.174]) by amri.cisco.com (8.3/8.3) with ESMTP id PAA00064; Tue, 20 Jun 1995 15:22:03 -0700
Received: from localhost.cisco.com (localhost.cisco.com [127.0.0.1]) by puli.cisco.com (8.6.8+c/8.6.5) with SMTP id PAA19057; Tue, 20 Jun 1995 15:26:38 -0700
Message-Id: <199506202226.PAA19057@nks for the responses to my questions, now for the second round :-).

        I now have VSTa booting from a DOS partition and then running a VSTa
partition (partition 3 or wd0_dos1, 90Mb) as the root partition. My problems
now are:
        1. runrc has the location of sh hardcoded into it. I fixed this by
hardcoding the new location into it :-). (I don't know anything about rcs so
I simply used cat to create a writeable version of the file runrc.c). The
question is, how many other programs expect specific locations (in
particularpuli.cisco.com>
To: Dave Hudson <dave@humbug.demon.co.uk>
Cc: jeske@uiuc.edu, VSTa mailing list <vsta@cisco.com>
Subject: Re: VSTa mounting and paths
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 19 Jun 1995 09:10:36 BST."
             <m0sNbun-00036rC@humbug.demon.co.uk>
Date: Tue, 20 Jun 1995 15:26:37 -0700
From: Andrew Valencia <vandys@cisco.com>

[Dave Hudson <dave@humbug.demon.co.uk> writes:]

>... Perhaps the solution is to patch libc to allow something
>similar, thus we have:
> #disk/wd:wd0_dos0
>as a server/path, and the more conventional
> /dev/wd/wd0_dos0
>for when #disk/wd has been mounted at /dev.

Sounds good.

>This might mean a reasonable amount of extra work to patch some of the
>utils (actually removing quite a bit of code I suspect), but would give us a
>pretty consistent view. If nothing else, adopting something like this gives
>us a consistent way to name files within VSTa (it's implicit whether we have
>a server reference or a "mounted" pathname).

I agree. The dichotomy between what is advertised as a service and how many expect a leading /vsta) ?
        2. I altered the rc shell script to setup the path as "/bin:/boot:."
however sh then bombs out complaining about the two colons and the "exit 0"
at the end of the script.
        3. Since the script bombs out, the TERM environment variable is not
set but if I leave it that way, or set it using the same command line as the
rc script, neither vi nor emacs work. vi responds with a message that nansi
is not supported and I should try one of the supported m what is
available in your name space should be preserved. The question is how you
straddle the two name spaces. Currently, it's done by distinct function
calls. I think a convention like Dave proposes is a reasonable improvement.

                                                        Andy

odes (which it
lists), yet trying these modes simply responds with an even quicker version
of the same message and again it doesn't work. less also comes up with a
series of messages indicating that it can't scroll backwards, can't clear
the screen etc. these are all the same messages that I get when I set the
TERM variable to unknown under Unix.

        These three problems are fairly major, in particular the last two,
and of course without the editors it is impossible to edit anything! I have
resorted to simply booting under DOS and running the system from the /vsta
directory on the dos partition and mounting my vsta partition under /v, but
I'd prefer to be able to just use the VSTa partition (which otherwise works
quite nicely).

        As a small aside, does anyone know where a partition actually
starts? When I formatted the VSTa partition I used a size equal to the
number of sectors that fdisk (under Linux) said were available for that
partition, yet after I copied the entire system across to the new partition
and then used dd to capture (again under Linux) the first few K of the
partition, I found that the first sector of the partition (struct fs,
according to vstafs.h) actually started 31.5 K into the partition. The
offsets and contents of the rest of the partition seemed to be correct and
the preceding bytes were 0. Is this normal? This was originally a dos
partition and is now recognised by linux as an extended dos partition,
though it won't mount it (bad magic number) although Windows doesn't seem to
mind me accessing it (just gives me "no files found").

I'd appreciate any help with the 2nd and 3rd problems, the first is simply
something I'm curious about, as is the start of the partition question.

Thanks

______
Francis Bogsanyi
fbogsanyi@pcug.org.au
Received on Tue Jun 20 15:23:40 1995