On Mon, 2 Mar 1998, Rob Mohr wrote:

> I have a few questions about the NetBSD 1.3/pmax port:

I can help you with a couple of them...

> What (if any) are the NetBSD equivalents of the adduser, removeuser, 
> addgroup, and uucpsetup commands available in Ultrix 4.4?

They don't exist.  The rationale I've heard is that every system is going
to need different defaults and actions for adding users, so there's no
easy way to make an adduser tool which would be usable by everybody.
However, you can check the adduser(8) page for information on the
procedure you want to follow.  I'd strongly recommend writing your own
shell script to handle this job.

> Is there a program available that will periodically go out and access the 
> file system?  I have an older Seagate drive that is spinning down after a 
> period of disuse.  When I attempt to access the file system after it has 
> spun down, the drive is not spinning back up.  The only way I have found to 
> get the drive to spin back up is to power cycle it.  Not, a very good idea 
> without halting the system and powering down first.  Is there a simple cron 
> entry I can make that goes out and writes and deletes a file every 15 or 30 
> minutes?  I have no experience with UNIX crontabs, so any help would be 
> appreciated.  Basically I just want to prevent the drive from going to 
> sleep.  (NOTE: If it sounds like this is abnormal behavior for a ST-41200 
> drive I would appreciate that feedback also.  I may be able to set a jumper 
> setting differently perhaps.)

That definitely does sound like abnormal behavior for a SCSI disk.  I've
asked before that somebody put into the kernel a clause that will try to
power-up SCSI drives that don't respond, but it apparently hasn't been
done, for whatever reason.  I'd recommend going to Seagate's web site and
finding the docs for your drive.  If that doesn't work, you can install a
crontab entry (using crontab -e) like the following:

*/30	*	*	*	*	ls /some/file/system > /dev/null

where /some/file/system is the path to the root directory of a filesystem
which resides on that drive.  This cron job should be able to run as any
user (not just root).  If it doesn't work, you may have to use "touch"
instead of ls, so that you're actually writing something to the drive
instead of reading from it.

> Is there any work on a NetBSD/pmax port of Sun's Java JDK?  I would be very 
> intrested in getting involved in anything that might be going on in that 
> arena.  If nothing is going on currently, would anyone be intrested in my 
> contacting Sun about licensing the source for such a project?  I am not 
> sure that Sun would do that free of charge, but its worth a shot.

No idea.

Chris

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Chris Jones                                      cjones@rupert.oscs.montana.edu
           Mad scientist in training...
"Is this going to be a stand-up programming session, sir, or another bug hunt?"