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Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd Path: sserve!manuel!munnari.oz.au!uunet!caen!destroyer!terminator!news From: pauls@icecreambar.css.itd.umich.edu (Paul Southworth) Subject: 386bsd: memory error, perl, ftp problems, tset, compiling Message-ID: <1992Sep22.201124.19207@terminator.cc.umich.edu> Keywords: 386bsd perl ftp tset swap Sender: news@terminator.cc.umich.edu (Usenet Owner) Reply-To: pauls@umich.edu Organization: University of Michigan Date: Tue, 22 Sep 1992 20:11:24 GMT Lines: 70 Please help with the following problems. I haven't seen them in my several cursory readings of Terry's magnificent FAQ. Will summarize if there is interest. Background: OPTi 386WB (64k) motherboard, AMD 386/40, Western Digital 124Mb IDE, 4Mb 80ns RAM, plain ole VGA card (Oak). Full binary and etc distributions for 0.1 installed. Default amount of swap (whatever that is) after normal installation. ***** Problem #1: Received the following error today. Was just minding my own business, cleaning up files. I was the only user on the system and I had no user-initiated background processes going. %rm * free (20008) above top of memory.memtop = 2b800 membot = 23504 <then it logged me out> What the heck is *that*? ***** Problem #2: PERL! How do I get it for 386BSD? Can you think of any better (or alternately effective) way to mirror an ftp site? PERL was suggested by the person whose site it is I want to mirror. ***** Problem #3: Many times people ftp'ing into my anonymous site (you can try it yourself if you want--redspread.css.itd.umich.edu or 141.211.182.91) will find that there is no visible directory structure. This happens EVERY time when people use those godawful FTP front-end programs, like NeXT FTP+ or Fetch 2.x for the Mac. There is a connection, and if they specify file and directory path, they can download, but no file list shows up. I have (rarely) also found this to be the case when ftp'ing without using one of those programs, but they do fail 100% of the time. ***** Problem #4: Compiling. My hunch is that this is either a RAM or swap deficiency problem, but I would like advice as to how to alleviate crashing (ie, hanging) when I attempt to compile things with make & cc. For example, I have tried to compile Kermit that came with the etc01 distribution, among other things, and found that EVERY time I compile something the system will crash. It will go merrily about its way (seeming slow to me, but what do I know?) and give perhaps 4 or 5 non-error messages, then it will just freeze. It does this in single user mode as well as with multiple users on the system, and I have tried it remotely (after su to root) and at console (logging in as superuser). If this is a memory/swap deficiency, as I suspect, what would be acceptable amount of swap (which is cheaper than RAM after all, especially since the hard drive is paid for) to have on a machine that may get a fair bit of ftp traffic, will rarely have more than two users involved with interactive sessions, has no newsreading going on, no X (just say no to X), and is not being used as a developer's workstation (ie, I just want to compile some stuff other people have written occasionally). ***** Problem #5: "tset" -- where is it please? I have looked on a couple of ftp sites and found the src/.../tset directory empty. I would feel very special if I could have tset on my machine for my very own. Paul Southworth | ftp to redspread.css.itd.umich.edu Consulting and Support Services | Anonymous Political Archives Information Technology Division | 100% 386BSD 0.1 Univeristy of Michigan, Ann Arbor | Coming soon: mirror of ftp.eff.org