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* On 2005.05.13, in <428566DE.8000006@xxxxxxxxxxx.xxx>,
* "Robert G. Werner" <robert@xxxxxxxxxxx.xxx> wrote:
> >there's not even a goddamn pager (more or less) on the tiger install
> >DVD. but there's a perl interpreter. apple can't give me a fucking
> >pager in /usr/bin, but they can give me /usr/bin/perl? (and finger?
>
> Maybe it's a test. Maybe they want you to write your own version of
> more or less in perl.
I did IRIX support in a shop with 150 or so SGI boxes, around the time
it became impossible to delay any longer in upgrading our various
hardware-specific releases of 5.3, 6.2, 6.3, and 6.4 to 6.5, the Grand
Unified IRIX. SGI's manual installation procedure is a superlative
pain in all exposed body parts simultaneously; to upgrade all the
systems manually would have easily cost us between 600 and 1000
man-hours, depending indivual machine complexity and on how parallelized
the procedure could be made for any given roomful of machines. Our
network was spread over several square miles of labs, so a quick jaunt
between CD 2 and CD 3 wasn't really likely. So I developed a network
auto-installer, similar to Jumpstart, or Kickboot or Tirekick or
whatever those Red Hut people call theirs. SGI had recently developed
one called RoboInst, but it was really quite shoddy, as though it were
one front-line support staffer's weekend project, yet it cost $10,000
even under contract, and while we had $10,000, it sadly wasn't on the
ledger line for gutter sludge.
The problem was that my installer, not being really a full-scale product
and certainly not something I wished to maintain into the future, still
depended upon the genuine SGI CD miniroot that it TFTPed upon netboot.
I'd discovered a procedure for building one's own miniroot from dd(1)ed
efs images and some yarn and beeswax, but I wasn't really comfortable
deploying it since I was sole possessor of the arcana and was planning
to jump ship in a month or two. And SGI's miniroot, being intended just
to bootstrap their manual installation process, had no pager.
So I wrote one. In Bourne shell, the only interpreter on the miniroot.
It had to run with no external dependencies. This is not in itself very
much to speak of, since there's basically nothing you can do in such
straits but copy lines, while read echo, but then I discovered that expr
was on the miniroot, and dd and stty, and soon I was adding features of
more like regular expression searches and "--Much-- (47%)". ("Much is a
pager that's even less than more.")
It was an interesting experiment, but I could never really understand
why they didn't just put a pager on the miniroot. Sometimes I wonder,
though, whether in the end there is more hate owed to the chicken, or to
the egg that chicken hate inspires.
--
-D. dgc@xxxxxxxx.xxx NSIT University of Chicago
There's stuff above here
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