Date: Thu, 15 Feb 1996 10:37:05 +1030 (CST) From: Michael Smith <msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au> To: muir@idiom.com (David Muir Sharnoff) Cc: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: An ISP's Wishlist... Message-ID: <199602150007.KAA18935@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au> In-Reply-To: <199602141750.JAA16327@idiom.com> from "David Muir Sharnoff" at Feb 14, 96 09:50:52 am
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
David Muir Sharnoff stands accused of saying: > > I know you've seen such things before, so I'm sending mostly to > keep the feedback coming. Wishlists are a Good Thing 8) > ** Things that were so import that I've cobbled together > solutions to the following. If someone wants what I've > done, contact me. Yes. All of it. Put it where people can get at it and advertise same. Pester for someone to review and commit whatever is relevant. 8) > fixed boca16 driver so that it doesn't hang once a week. (No current > urgency -- I bought a pair of Cyclades 16e's to use until the boca > driver is fixed) It appears that there's a problem with acknowledging interrupts and the Boca cards. I don't know if Joe Greco ever got to the beottom of his locking up... > A named that didn't die or at least restarted automatically. Lack > of a nameserver can be a problem. My guess is that the named problems > stem from having a system that is constantly running ifconfig... It > doesn't seem to like to have the addresses that it binds to change. Wrap it in a tiny shellscript : while [ 1 ]; do named $* done > It would be very nice to be able to have a separate configuration for > each port that named might bind to. There are times when I want to > serve different information to different nets. This is particularly > handy when building firewalls. That definitely falls into "you have the source" 8) > Memory efficiency. The most expensive part of putting a system > together at the moment is memory. What have you identified as the major wasters of memory? If you're running 2.1 or -STABLE, bring malloc.c in from current and recompile libc. This gets you the new phkmalloc, which seems to be somewhat more efficient. > automatic reboot and report of diagnostics when the system > hangs in disk wait. Justin has this (for SCSI disks) on the drawing board. > Getty should track modem disconnect codes, reset the modem, and > notice incoming faxes. I've already modified the default getty > to notice PPP connects, but that's needed here too. Modem disconnect coeds are as good as impossible to catch; some modems emit then before dropping DCD, so there's no way of knowing that they _are_ disconnect codes. To do this properly would require major modifications to the serial driver(s). mgetty does much of what else you want; it also recognises incoming FNT connections. > Support for Win95 PPP modes that to autoconfigure DNS server This would be (AFAIK) in direct violation of a number of the RFC's that define PPP. There was some discussion on this a while back; non consensus was reached as I recall. > A port of 'ofiles' or 'lsof' lsof should be in the ports collection. I believe I've seen discussion on 'ofiles', but I'm not sure. 'fstat' is quite helpful sometimes. > SMP. Sometimes more CPU is needed. This is being worked on; if you have resources, talk to Terry. > Real layered filesystems. In particular, I want to layer system > configurations over a read-only root filesystem that is replicated > to all my computers. Fix the unionfs 8) > Reliable and secure NIS or an equivelent. There's completely new NIS code going in to 2.2 as we speak. From reading the commit messages this is a serious piece of work. > Pkg_manage enhancements to show what has been installed. I > typically install about 90% of the packages and it's a real pain > to remember what's been installed. And don't mention that useless > unsorted list on the right. pkg_manage was recently diked, IIRC. pkg_info will tell you what's installed : 'pkg_info -aI |sort' > Better support for CDROM changers: it would be nice if it figured > out a mount point by looking at the disk the way that Solaris does. Not enough disks have meaningful identifiers; still, this could be done with a shellscript. > Better and easier OS emulation support. In order of importance: > Win3.1, Win95, Coming, but nontrivial. See Wine and TWIN. > Solaris, Dunno 8) > Macintosh (emulated), Via Executor & the Linux emulation. > BSDI, Linux, Already in place. > WinNT, Not likely in the short-term future. > DOS, Already (PCemu), will get better (DOSemu) > Sys5.4, and SCO. iBCS2 and particularly SCO support is there already. > I would like to be able to call up Frame > and say, please send me a copy for ??? without worrying that it > won't work. Dreaming 8) > Better filesystem compatability. In order: DOS (improved), In progress. > Linux (can be handled by SysV filesystem support because Linux No it can't, but we already have ext2fs support. > also has it). Much less important: all the rest (Win95, WinNT, > OS/2, SCO, Linux native, UMSDOS) VFAT is likely once the FAT support is fixed. There's a readonly NTFS around already. I don't recall anyone working on HPFS, SCO or UMSDOS. UMSDOS should be redundant (apart from for compatability reasons) once VFAT is done. > Netscape commerce server style sysadmin interface. (Have you installed > netscape's server lately?). Very good for the system as a whole, for > various daemons: apache, samba, inetd, named, innd, sendmail (well, maybe > not), gated, etc. Yetch. Requires netscape; not necessarily a winner. > Appletalk support. disks, printers, Apple Remote Access. CAP works, gives you 2 of 3 8) > Netware support. Linux has it. In what regard? FreeBSD can route IPX as well. Thanks for the list! -- ]] Mike Smith, Software Engineer msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au [[ ]] Genesis Software genesis@atrad.adelaide.edu.au [[ ]] High-speed data acquisition and (GSM mobile) 0411-222-496 [[ ]] realtime instrument control (ph/fax) +61-8-267-3039 [[ ]] Collector of old Unix hardware. "I seek PEZ!" - The Tick [[
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?199602150007.KAA18935>