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Date: Sun 24-Sep-1989 23:45:47 From: Unknown Subject: Re: Remote NeXT Users, etc. In article <8248@oregon.uoregon.edu> joe@oregon.uoregon.edu (Joe St Sauver) writes: >Remote Users -- Beyond the Pale? > >I agree with Joe Stone that NeXT is wrong to treat remote users as if they are >beyond the pale just because they aren't sitting in from of a MegaPixel >display. > > (stuff deleted...) > >The existence of documentation locked into WriteNow-only format is one example >of NeXT's hubris, as is being told that Preferences is "the" way to change >user passwords. (more deleted...) To a certain extent, you have a point; perhaps some of these beefs will be fixed, if not in 1.0, then maybe in 1.1. Face it, though: unless you use something like X Windows, remote users *are* second class citizens...as an example, I'm composing this message from home, using my modem and running a terminal emulation program on my PS/2. The machine at the other end is a Sun-3/280, but I can't run Sunview remotely. I can't become the super user remotely. There are many things I can't do remotely. So what? People who are grumbling about WriteNow documentation, rather than grumbling, should sit down and hack together the nroff analogue of WriteNow, so that they can see online documentation in a restricted but still legible manner. You're going to lose a lot of what makes NeXT special, and I honestly don't know what you're going to do about pictures, but, if WriteNow works the way I think it does, it shouldn't be too much of a hassle. Put a NeXT on my desk and I could do a first approximation to such a program in a couple of hours. So could you. Don't grumble; go do it. ...laura >From: jst@cca.ucsf.edu (Joe Stong)
Date: Sun 25-Sep-1989 03:13:33 From: Unknown Subject: Re: Remote NeXT Users, etc. Ever hear of a problem called "elitism"? Do you know what the word "plutocracy" means? I cannot afford a minimum $6500 for a machine, even if I could, I might buy something else on which I get more work in programming. I help Karpinski, the owner of the NeXT, with administering it, for entertainment, education, and out of the kindness of my heart. I have received some truly helpful and informative mail, that does not tell me: "You cannot do that" "It's in the next release" or insult my intellegence by telling me things that I've already mentioned, like that I know I'm trying to do something difficult. I know that Avadis, in his own way, is trying to be helpful. I appreciate that he wants to help, but I would like to get across to him that some kinds of "help" serve to make me livid. I have done my best not to flame him to death, even though I feel like it. He might do better to be silent, and let people who have answers come through. He probably feels unappreciated. I do appreciate some of the overall technical niceness of the NeXT. I don't like the diety-like attitude of telling me what I can and cannot do with the computer I'm working on, and being asked to work on. I realize that tekkies have a tendency to be gratuitous. I've tried and thought of a lot of things that folks re-suggest to me as if I could never have though of them myself. This particular problem can be overcome a lot by assuming intellegence and some wits on the part of the listening party and suggesting: Have you tried ... ? "I did these things." ("I" is the person making the suggestions) You might find this useful. Rather than suggesting bluntly that I SHOULD do things which they assume that I'm not. There have been some lovely responses here, giving real suggestions, and a couple that seem to amount to "Nyahh, bad boy, you're doing something you ought not be doing." Get the point: I have no choice in doing remote system administration, what I'm doing is asking for help. I also think that it is philosophically wise to maintain the UNIX man page style manuals, with appropriate cross references, so that people don't get lost, not knowing where to go next in documentation. I think there are some real documentation problems on the NeXT. This was never apologized for, or even admitted. the disk commands, when run returns the message: ... somewhere -i is mentioned in a long list of options ... interactive mode if no action flags specified So, one might presume that -i is not an action flag, and that the example is how to run the program in interactive mode since that is what they are talking about on the previous line. It's just a faulty message. Indeed, the program will ask for confirmation, but from a remote terminal, it puts up a dialogue box on the main screen which the remote terminal can't see and hangs. (EEK, I've zeroed the disk) and I can't interrupt it. Since there seems to be no low level re-format command, I thought that bulk might do it, and solve my problems with an overflowing badblock table. Whoopee crasho! But "that's a known bug". It doesn't help me get files backed off the machine. I'm not stupid, all of the stuff on the NeXT is non-critical, and present elsewhere, but it would be awfully convenient not to have to re-load it all after we install the 1.0 release. What about the poor folks who DID do development or put files on the machine since the previous release, and can't do network backup like I can? This is too much of the details. The point is when one is frustrated and trying hard to make it work, it doesn't help for people to say: "Stupid bad boy, you should be doing that" When there are real problems with bugs at critical points. An apology or a gentle reminder that "we weren't expecting people to use the machine that way, sorry" would be more appropriate. I don't know that even USING the window interface would get me any closer to doing a successful local backup, either, that issue just seemed to get slimed over. :-( Teflon, anyone? :-) >From: rock@lighthouse.com (Roger Rock Rosner)
Date: Sun 25-Sep-1989 21:49:20 From: Unknown Subject: Re: Remote NeXT Users, etc. In article <2422@ucsfcca.ucsf.edu> jst@cca.ucsf.edu.UUCP (Joe Stong) writes: I haven't been reading this group for very long (2 days), and I have absolutely NO experience with the Next Box. However, Some people have mentioned that one cannot become root remotely. Login will not normally allow one to logon as the super user from anywhere but the system console. It is possible that /bin/su is written in a similar way (and thus is not like normal /bin/su). In such a case, it is possible to cheat and write a small sushi-program: main { check for proper user-id or die. if uid is the correct one, then { setuid(0); setgid(0); /* Now You're superuser */ exec the shell with the log-on switch (read .cshrc, .login) } } Make a login for yourself (sysadmin, op, or some other name) put the compiled sushi program into /users/op/bin (op's home bin directory) login as root on the system console, make the sushi program setuid and owned by root. Then when you run the program as op, it will make you superuser with no questions asked. If this doesn't work then I don't know what the problem could be. I assume that you have /bin/su /bin/passwd as setuid owned by root. Hope this helps. John J. Marco pa1034@iugrad2.ucsd.edu >From: curtis@madnix.UUCP (Curt Chambers)
Date: Sun 26-Sep-1989 02:39:58 From: Unknown Subject: Re: Remote NeXT Users, etc. <2422@ucsfcca.ucsf.edu> Listen, Joe: It's fine if you want to use things in ways in which the designers did not intend them to be used. For example, feel free to drive your car with your only your feet instead of your hands (but not on my street, of course). It's also fine for you to ask for help from the designers, or the company they work for, when you do something like this. For example, it seems reasonable (if a little weird) to write to the Ford Motor Company and say "I can't figure out how to steer my car very well. And by the way, I can't use my hands to do it, either." But it's *not* fine to expect immediate help in this situation. It is perfectly reasonable (if not particularly helpful) for someone from the Ford Motor Company to write back "Well, you'll have to use your hands to steer correctly." At this point, you pretty much have to take them at their word, and either figure it out for yourself, or do it the way they designed it. It's especially *not* fair to broadcast your beef with the company to the world, publishing such statements as "Ford Motor Company has bad PR!" or "Engineer X at Ford Motor Company is an unhelpful person" before you take the problem up with Ford itself. And if you don't get a reasonable response from Engineer X, you should ask to talk to his supervisor, rather than immediately publishing deprecatory statements about X. So please *don't post* your complaints about the company or its people. I (and I think most other) news readers here don't think you're being fair. You're not only trying to drive the brand new car with your feet, you're apparently volunteering to drive the brand new car with your feet for someone else, discovering that you can't do a very good job that way, and then publishing personal complaints to thousands of people when the car company tells you that you currently have to use your hands to drive. To be fair, I (and probably some of the other news readers) are interested in the technical problems you've encountered. I am sure that the people at NeXT are interested in the technical problems you've found, even if they can't give you an immediate workaround. I'm sure the NeXT product could be improved, but it will be improved most quickly if we all send in clear, concise bug reports, rather than personal complaints. I won't go into the gory details of the problems you've brought up, except to choose one example where I think you are being unreasonable. You say that it would be philosophically wise to maintain the Unix man pages. Perhaps it would, if you could automatically generate them from the new documentation. Digital Librarian in combination with the (pretty darn good) on-line documentation is *far* superior to the old man pages from a neophyte's point of view. You say that man pages would keep people from getting lost, not knowing where to go next in documentation. You have apparently never watched a novice user try to use man pages on a Unix system. Most sincerely, Dennis Gentry (dennis@cpac.washington.edu) CPAC Computing Services Manager, and NeXT UW Campus Advocate >From: dayglow@csli.Stanford.EDU (Eric T. Ly)
Date: Sun 26-Sep-1989 05:41:47 From: Unknown Subject: Re: Remote NeXT Users, etc. In article <1166@sdcc13.ucsd.EDU>, pa1034@sdcc13.ucsd.EDU (John Marco) writes: > In article <2422@ucsfcca.ucsf.edu> jst@cca.ucsf.edu.UUCP (Joe Stong) writes: > I haven't been reading this group for very long (2 days), and I have absolutely > NO experience with the Next Box. However, Some people have mentioned that one > cannot become root remotely. Login will not normally allow one to logon as > the super user from anywhere but the system console. It is possible that ... (A solution to the problem) ... Sure you can. I don't believe you need to write a program to fix it even. This problem stumped me too, but I discovered that if you edit the /etc/ttys file by putting the word "secure" at the end of several of the "tty" lines, you can rlogin as "root". Eric Ly CSLI, Stanford University >From: jst@cca.ucsf.edu (Joe Stong)
Date: Sun 26-Sep-1989 09:50:00 From: Unknown Subject: Re: Remote NeXT Users, etc. Many thanks to various folks that have offered help and question answering services. Particular thanks to Eric P. Scott (wet!epsilon@cca.ucsf.edu), who helped me set up "slave" nameservice, and suggested using Microsoft Word(tm) format output from WriteNow being at least near to ascii. Particular thanks also to the fellow who posted the WriteNow to troff converter (I can't get to the article just now). There's a problem with a misattribution: John Marco managed to make his response look like a quote from a posting of mine. The "I haven't been, etc. is part of John Marco's response, and not my quote. >In article <1166@sdcc13.ucsd.EDU>, pa1034@sdcc13.ucsd.EDU (John Marco) writes: >> In article <2422@ucsfcca.ucsf.edu> jst@cca.ucsf.edu.UUCP (Joe Stong) writes: >> I haven't been reading this group for very long (2 days), and I have absolutely >> NO experience with the Next Box. However, Some people have mentioned that one With respect to the "su" problem, I was able to create the secondary root login just fine, once I got rid of the second copy of "users" in NetInfo. While I had two "users" entries, it was interesting that I managed to get an "Intruder Alert" message from "su". My apologies for getting a bit snide in my previous message. I have been trying my best to prevent outright flamage, and would appreciate the same from responders. Thanks for support, and for people reminding Avadis that he's appreciated. >From: aisl@uhura.cc.rochester.edu (Lawrence Landry)
Date: Sun 27-Sep-1989 20:58:09 From: Unknown Subject: Remote NeXT Users, etc. In his message of 25 Sep 89 03:13:33 GMT jst@cca.ucsf.edu writes: > > Listen, Joe: > > It's fine if you want to use things in ways in which the > designers did not intend them to be used. For example, feel > free to drive your car with your only your feet instead of your > hands (but not on my street, of course). > > [stuff deleted] > .... > > To be fair, I (and probably some of the other news readers) are > interested in the technical problems you've encountered. I am > sure that the people at NeXT are interested in the technical > problems you've found, even if they can't give you an immediate > workaround. I'm sure the NeXT product could be improved, but > it will be improved most quickly if we all send in clear, > concise bug reports, rather than personal complaints. Agreed. I myself found the original poster's tone a bit too snarky however that said, I have to strongly disagree with the following. > I won't go into the gory details of the problems you've brought > up, except to choose one example where I think you are being > unreasonable. You say that it would be philosophically wise to > maintain the Unix man pages. I don't at all think this to a be an unreasonable request. Since I do it on a regular basis, standard UNIX man pages, for those of us who are used to them, are easy to change and update. I am a member of a system staff charged with operating a number of NeXT machines (probably with more on the way), and I find having the documentation split between the Librarian and the man pages to be a real pain in the butt. I have no problem with NeXT trying to expand the man pages in the Librarian, however, there is no excuse for not having the basics (where the command is, a short description and what it's options are) in a man page available to be read on a standard ascii terminal. I should *not* have to go to another building to get to a Cube to get this information. If NeXT is pushing it's ``compatibility'' with 4.3 BSD then whatever it layers on top of 4.3 the underlying functionality should still be there. We haven't yet had the time to upgrade to 1.0 but I should hope that such glaring omissions as not mentioning that vipw did not update the Netinfo stuff was perhaps acceptable for 0.9, *not* for 1.0. The Librarian might be very pretty and useful for the neophyte, but those of us who have to maintain the machines (and us used-to-be neophytes) have come to expect a certain functionality. Please have it available. If you're going to be giving me BSD and more, fine. But get the BSD right first. Alan (bajan@cs.mcgill.ca or listmaster@cs.mcgill.ca) >From: tchard@indetech.com (Tom Chard)
Date: Sun 28-Sep-1989 15:00:00 From: Unknown Subject: Re: Remote NeXT Users, etc. /* ---------- "Remote NeXT Users, etc." ---------- */ In his message of 25 Sep 89 03:13:33 GMT jst@cca.ucsf.edu writes: > > Listen, Joe: > > It's fine if you want to use things in ways in which the > designers did not intend them to be used. For example, feel > free to drive your car with your only your feet instead of your > hands (but not on my street, of course). > > [stuff deleted] > >If you're going to be giving me BSD and more, fine. But get the BSD right >first. I think it is perfectly clear that NEXT is using Unix simply as an expedient on the way to building a proprietary OS. They really want to be an island unto themselves, like Apple, in order to lock users in to their proprietary stuff. The difference from Apple is that they started from a real multitasking OS - but, given the way this thread is going, they seem to be trying to prevent NeXts from working well in a heterogeneous networked system (well, half way - they probably will work fine logged INTO a remote ordinary unix box). IF you want Unix, buy a real Unix box. There are lots of them. Doug McDonald >From: woo@pioneer.arc.nasa.gov (Alex Woo)
Date: Sun 30-Sep-1989 04:46:19 From: Unknown Subject: Re: Remote NeXT Users, etc. In article <245300020@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu> mcdonald@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu writes: > >/* ---------- "Remote NeXT Users, etc." ---------- */ > >In his message of 25 Sep 89 03:13:33 GMT jst@cca.ucsf.edu writes: >> > >I think it is perfectly clear that NEXT is using Unix simply as >an expedient on the way to building a proprietary OS. They really >want to be an island unto themselves, like Apple, in order to lock >users in to their proprietary stuff. The difference from Apple >is that they started from a real multitasking OS - but, given >the way this thread is going, they seem to be trying to prevent >NeXts from working well in a heterogeneous networked system >(well, half way - they probably will work fine logged INTO a remote >ordinary unix box). > >IF you want Unix, buy a real Unix box. There are lots of them. > >Doug McDonald Perhaps NeXT is going a proprietory route, but then if it works as well as something like NSF, so what. I read in EE Times recently that OSF might adopt MACH, as an expedient to AIX. Lots of folks in that OSF crowd -- and IBM seems to have popularity. Why, I can't imagine. ... as long as filesystems can be mounted. -Myron // mdeale@cosmos.acs.calpoly.edu <disclaimer.std> >From: jacob@gore.com (Jacob Gore)
Date: Sun 01-Oct-1989 21:57:39 From: Unknown Subject: Re: Remote NeXT Users, etc. In article <1989Sep30.044619.18106@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU> mdeale@cosmos.acs.calpoly.edu.UUCP (Myron Deale) writes: > I read in EE Times recently that OSF might adopt MACH, as an expedient >to AIX. Lots of folks in that OSF crowd -- and IBM seems to have popularity. I've been chatting with a couple people here who are in the Free Software Foundation. Apparently, they're trying real hard to use the Mach kernel as the basis for GNU. | Dan Zerkle home:(805) 968-4683 morning:961-2434 afternoon:687-0110 | | dz@cornu.ucsb.edu dz%cornu@ucsbuxa.bitnet ...ucbvax!hub!cornu!dz | | Snailmail: 6681 Berkshire Terrace #5, Isla Vista, CA 93117 | | Disclaimer: If it's wrong or stupid, pretend I didn't do it. | >From: UH2@PSUVM.BITNET (Lee Sailer)
These are the contents of the former NiCE NeXT User Group NeXTSTEP/OpenStep software archive, currently hosted by Marcel Waldvogel and Netfuture.ch.