#: 9062 S7/Telecommunications
    08-Jan-91  08:01:22
Sb: UUCP problems
Fm: Steve Wegert 76703,4255
To: All

Mark replies to some UUCP questions: >

In Message 9015 Tom Napolitano says:

>     I see mentioned on the coco echo that some folks are saying Mark's uucp
>does not communicate properly with 386 machines?   What are the details?
>Who's 386 Unix port and which programs don't work?  I found this surprising,
>since my coco3 at home exchanges mail quite nicely, thankyou, with the compaq
>386 running Interactive's 386/ix at work. Could you elaborate please?

Sigh, yes it is true...there are at least a couple machines that my UUCP
protocol has trouble talking with.  So far, I know about a DEC microVAX running
ULTRIX and a Intel 386 box running an unknown 386 version of UNIX. I suppose
there are more lurking out there someplace.  I think one or more Apple
implementations have trouble also.

In Message 9016, James Jones says:

>My guess--and it's only a guess, >of course--is, considering that VAXen and
386s both have the bizarro >leastsignificant-byte-first byte ordering, that
there's some part of the >protocol that contains byte-ordering-dependent values
that aren't getting >byte-swapped before use. I haven't looked in the (very
large!) uucp.ar to see >whether there is any indication of that's being the
problem, though.

You may be right there, but I think it is something less bizzare.  On all the
machines that my port has problems with, you can send to the problem machine
without any troubles, but you just can't receive anything from it, but only
after the two machines go into the 'g' protocol transfer mode.  I have looking
into the problem, but it is very very obscure as you can imagine.

On a lighter note, I do have a sliding windows version now running (actually,
sorta limping) and will be cleaning it up in the near future for release.  I
hope to have the above mentioned bug fixed by then too.  Dunno if any
non-upgraded CoCo's will be able to handle sliding windows UUCP tho....those
that had tried it failed.  I think I'll have to do some fancy optimizing to get
them to work OK.

Mark