Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!mailrus!cornell!ken
From: ken@gvax.cs.cornell.edu (Ken Birman)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.isis
Subject: ISIS on SUN OS 4.0.3
Message-ID: <32696@cornell.UUCP>
Date: 30 Sep 89 18:03:05 GMT
Sender: nobody@cornell.UUCP
Reply-To: ken@cs.cornell.edu (Ken Birman)
Distribution: comp
Organization: Cornell Univ. CS Dept, Ithaca NY
Lines: 23

I have had reports from two installations of minor problems with ISIS
under SUN OS 4.0.3.  As far as I can tell, this is because 4.0.3 has a
feature whereby programs running in the background "stop" when they
want to do terminal output.  This means that if you start the isis
system (and hence bin/rexec) up and then put it in the background,
the programs run by rexec -- like "twenty" -- may hang if any message
has to be printed.  They would restart as soon as you move "isis"
(and hence its children and their children) back to the foreground.

Compounding this is a new loader that seems to flush stdout during
startup, guaranteeing that even some programs that do no output at all
could hang at startup.

Things would presumably be fine if isis was kept in the foreground.

Does anyone know a simple fix for this?  We don't run 4.0.3 here at
Cornell yet, so I have a practical problem testing ISIS under this
SUN OS release.  Something tells me that there should be a pretty
trivial workaround on this one.

Please let me know if any other problems turn up.

Ken