Subject: solaris 2.3: good and not so good

From: [email-masked] (Cosmos Nicolaou)
Date: Mon, 22 Nov 1993 15:36:34 GMT

Here are my initial experiences with solaris 2.3 - some good and some
not so good!

The installation went pretty smoothly - I did a complete re-install
(using a second hard disk to back up my root disk) and all went well.

On the good side, /kernel/drv/st.conf allows you add 3'rd party drives,
here's my entry for a sony sdt-4000 8G dat tape. It took about 15
minutes to get it all going - including testing ufsdump and ufsrestore -
modunload certainly saves a lot of time over hacking st_conf.c, relinking and
rebooting as in 4.1.

tape-config-list = "SONY    SDT-4000", "", "sony_sdt_4000";
sony_sdt_4000 = 1, 0x34, 0, 0x679, 4, 0, 0, 0x8c, 0x8c, 0x8c, 3;

I understand all of this apart from the density values (0x8c) which I
copied from the man page. Any ideas?

Printing - still as broken as ever, the release notes say that sun will
junk the v.4 code in the next release - about time too!

I've managed to get it to work, but for some reason I always get an
error report when printing postscript files! The files print fine, so I
can live with it, but it this clearly a bug. The problem is caused by
postio outputing messages to stdout out, such as ``printer startup'' as it
goes about its business. The standard output of postio (or postcomm or
whatever filter you use) is fed to lp.tell's standard input - these
messages then trick lp.tell into thinking that postio is reporting an
error - it complains to the sysadmin, but meanwhile the file is printed.
Any ideas what's going on - I've applied patch 101317-02, but it made no
difference?

Other than that the upgrade went pretty smoothly apart from finger/brain
trouble on my part!

    	Cheers, Cos.

Cosmos Nicolaou

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