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: <dinah@lgc.com>
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