Re: 1unix rwho0

[Brad Miller <miller@acorn.cs.rochester.edu>]

An old conversation rears it's ugly head!

    Date: Fri, 18 Sep 87 08:35 EDT
    From: Eric S. Crawley <Crawley@ALDERAAN.SCRC.Symbolics.COM>

	Date: Thu, 17 Sep 87 21:41 EDT
	From: Brad Miller <miller@DOUGHNUT.CS.ROCHESTER.EDU>

1	    Date: Mon, 14 Sep 87 12:10 EDT
	    From: Eric S. Crawley <Crawley@ALDERAAN.SCRC.Symbolics.COM>

	        Date: Thu, 10 Sep 87 14:48:43 EDT
	        From: royt@pravda.gatech.edu (Roy M Turner)


	        I was looking over the documentation and noticed that the Symbolics
	        supports something called unix-rwho service; however, upon looking it
	        up in the TCP code, I didn't see that it really *did* anything except 
	        intercept rwho packets from unix hosts and store them in a variable.
	        Does anyone have any functions to make use of this information, such
	        as something that will do the equivalent of unix's rwho command?  Or 
	        even better, a replacement server that will send information back to 
	        Unix's rwho server, so that information about the lisp machines show
	        up in rwho's done on unix?

	        Thanks.

	        Roy

	    The Unix RWHO server has been removed in 7.2.  It is still in the files
	    but commented out at the moment.  It was removed because it is not a
	    standard Internet or lispm protocol and no one complained that it didn't
	    work.  The questions were more like "Why is this here?".  If you want a
	    hack that will give better information than the Unix RWHO, take a look
	    at the server-finger hack in SYS:EXAMPLES;.  

        It may give better info (well, then again, looks pretty much the same to me),
        but it isn't free: it fingers all your machines every n minutes. UNIX machines
        already broadcast RWHO, so the ideal soln, would be to take advantage of
        what's already on the net, and only fingering machines that aren't telling you
        anyway. RWHO may not be an internet standard, but how many sites don't have
        UNIX machines? RWHO is like NFS. It's there, it works, you may as well take
        advantage of it. Plus it's efficient: usually RWHO packets are broadcast.

0    Thanks for the input.  As I said above, no one ever complained about the
    Unix RWHO not working so we thought it would be easier to remove it than
    maintain it.  I agree that the ideal solution would be to combine the
    server-finger and Unix RWHO.  Perhaps we can bring Unix RWHO back and do
    it right so it can provide useful information.  However, I don't see
    this happening for 7.2 since all new features are frozen now.

I have a combined server-finger and UNIX RWHO that's been
running fine since 7.1. Yours for the asking.

----
Brad Miller		U. Rochester Comp Sci Dept.
miller@cs.rochester.edu {...allegra!rochester!miller}