Newbie needs help

[Klo]

I am new to SCO Unix (or any unix for that matter). I'm determined to learn this OS. Right now I have a very large headache that only seems to develope when I fire up the unix machine!
First problem: When using the SCO APC deamon(?)and connected to a Back-up UPS 650 via serial port,the machine will shut down a few seconds after getting into multiuser mode regardless of the "seconds before shutdown" setting. Any ideas?
Second problem: I have 3 computers here. A Windows XP Home machine, a Windows 2000 machine, and a SCO Unix 5.06 machine. The XP machine has a USB broadband modem and all 3 are networked. The SCO machine is connected but that's it. I can ping the card on the SCO machine but nowhere else. How do I get internet on the SCO machine?
Third: Is there any way to download software for unix on the XP machine, burn it to a cd, and then get the unix machine to recognize the data on the cd?
Major headache for me but I sure easy for the experts out there. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks

 

[apeasecpc]

Regarding question number 1: I can think of two possibilities here. Either your UPS has gone bad, or the serial cable that connects the UPS to the system is not wired correctly for the APC software. Different UPS software packages expect power failures to be reported on different serial signal lines. What happens if you run the power through the UPS as normal, but don't plug in the serial cable? If the power down problem doesn't happen when you do this, then your problem is probably the cabling. If the problem still happens when you do this, the problem is probably the UPS.


Regarding question number 3: SCO Openserver recognizes standard cd formats, so you can burn UNIX CD's the same way you burn DOS/Windows CD's. Do the following to mount the CD in UNIX:

1) Create a mount point. In UNIX a mount point is simply an empty directory, such as "/mnt", in fact the "/mnt" directory is commonly used for mounting miscellaneous filesystems like floppy's and CD's, but you could also use your own directory name such as "/cdrom". The command to create the directory (if it doesn't exist) is "mkdir /mnt".

2) Mount the device to the mount point. The command to mount the cd is "mount /dev/cd0 /mnt" (replace "/mnt" with whatever directory you are using as the mount point).

3) Access the CD. UNIX mounts filesystems as subdirectories, so accessing a mounted CD is no different than accessing any other directory, except that you can't write to its location. To access a directory "/sco" contained on the CD, all you do is refer to the directory from the mount point, or "/mnt/sco" (replace "/mnt" with whatever directory you are using as the mount point).

4) Unmount the CD. With UNIX it is important to unmount the CD filesystem before you remove the CD from the drive. Do this by the command "umount /mnt" (replace "/mnt" with whatever directory you used as the mount point).

 

[Klo]

Thanks for the quick response! I guess I should have mentioned that both APC and Caldera address the problem with the UPS on their websites. Their answer is to increase the time before shutdown to 300 seconds. I tried that but it didn't work. The other answer is to download Powerchute plus for SCO. That brings me to the problem of burning the cd on the XP machine. I tried it again. I put pcsco45.tar on a new cd and closed the session. I mounted the cd using: mount /dev/cd0 /cdrom after creating /cdrom. I then entered: cp /dev/cd0 pcsco45.tar /cdrom and even: cp /dev/cd0 /pcsco45.tar /cdrom but to no avail. The error I got is: cp: error reading data from /dev/cd0: I/O error (error 5) and : cannot access pcsco45.tar no such file or directory. The cdrom reads fine when installing from SCO cds so it has to be something I'm doing.
By the way .... how do I list the directories and files on cd0? I tried ls -a /dev/cd0 but all I get is /dev/cd0 (even with a SCO cd)
Thanks again for your help.

 

[spddmon]

Hi KLO. Answering your question 2.
If your machines are networked via a broad band router, then I suppose the router is your dhcp server as well.
If you install rs506a patch for open server 5.0.6 and go to network configuration manager, netconfig from the command line, or scoadmin network configuration, you now have an option to let your 506 server get its Ip address via DHCP. Or you can keep the current number as long as it is on the same octet.
Supposing you know your router ip address, which is also your gateway, and your DNS numbers from your cable or DSL company, you would want to put the gateway=xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx in your /etc/default/tcp, and make a new file in /etc, call it resolv.conf, and in it you would enter the nameserver numbers, like this:
**************************
cd /etc
vi resolv.conf
nameserver xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
nameserver xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
***************************
now save the file and you can reboot or at the # sign type tcp stop
rcp start
now go to your netscape navigator and try it, you may have internet access.

 

[Klo]

Hi Medcomp,
Thanks for your help. I don't have a router. XP provides the DHCP service. I don't think this will make any difference though. I'll try your fix and let you know. Thanks again.

 

[apeasecpc]

Ok Klo, please try the UPS test I asked (i.e. with the serial cable unplugged) and tell me what happens.

Your copy command to move the file from the cdrom to the UNIX box isn't quite correct. What you want to do is something like this:

mkdir /pcsco45
mount /dev/cd0 /cdrom
cp /cdrom/pcsco45.tar /pcsco45
umount /cdrom
cd /pcsco45
tar -x pcsco45.tar

To list files on the cdrom would be:
mount /dev/cd0 /cdrom
l /cdrom
umount /cdrom


Regarding internet access (i.e. your question 2), I just successfully configured my system for internet access. Here's what I did.

First you need to figure out your internet gateway address.
1) From your windows 2000 machine click on the start menu and choose "run".
2) Type in "winipcfg" and click ok.
3) In the combo box of the ip configuration program, select the network card for the machine.
4) Write down the address for the default gateway. This is the address you need for the SCO box.

From the SCO console
1) Bring up the x-window (i.e. that is the graphical interface usually accessed by pressing Alt-F2)
2) After logging in as root, double-click on the "System Administration" icon.
3) Double-click on the "Internet Configuration" icon.
4) For the login user ID type in "admin". The password is the same as the root password (up to the first 8 characters) that was assigned when you first installed the system.
5) Follow the prompts on the screen. When it asks for the gateway, use the one you identified from the steps above.

 

[apeasecpc]

Correction: I don't think Windows 2000 has the "winipcfg" command. I work mostly with Windows 98, which does have it (leave it to Microsoft to completely change the command names when they come out with a new version). I believe the correct command for Windows 2000 is "ipconfig".

 

[Klo]

I really appreciate your help. Here's where I am so far. Everything works fine as long as the UPS is not connected via the serial port. I'm going to check on the cableing.
As far as internet access, I think I'm goint to have to use something like Samba since the XP box is doing the DHCP duties and the modem is USB. If I had an ethernet modem connected to a DSL router I think I could point it to the gateway and everything would work just like you said.
I still can't get the unix box to recognise any cds that I burn on the XP machine. CDs made for unix work fine. Must be something I'm doing when I make the cd.
Cheers, KLO

 

[Megabitman]

I don't believe that Samba is going to resolve your issue regarding internet access. What I'm curious about is your XP machine. Is it a multi-homed (two nic) system? Do you have valid internet addresses or are you attempting to use the internet sharing feature in XP?

 

[Klo]

I'm using the internet sharing feature.

 

[apeasecpc]

So when you run ipconfig from your Windows 2000 machine you don't get a default gateway address?

About your CD-Rom problem, It is my experience that some old CR-Rom drives don't read readwrite cd's very well. This might be your problem. How old is the drive you have in your SCO box? You might try exchanging it with a newer CD-Rom drive?

How big is the file for the powerchute software? Can you fit it on a floppy?

 

[josel]

Hello everyone!

Very interesting points went across this thread.

I wonder if Klo ever mkdev cd in his SCO box. Funny how you can use your scoadmin utility to install from CD even if the device has not been created - or so is what I recall experiencing in a COMPAQ PROLIANT 7000 some months ago.

Klo says that it works fine with CDs made for UNIX. Is this using the mount command or through the scoadmin?

Klo, if you still have this problem, what do you get if you did l -d /dev/*cd*? Does you 'hwconfig' show a CD-Rom?

I learned a couple of things here and wonder if Klo ever solved his problem with WEB/CD accessing.

Regards;

Jose Lerebours
KNOWLEDGE: Something you can give away enlessly and gain more of it in the process! - Jose Lerebours

 

[cliverhodes]

Hello All,
As mentioned before by Jose - interesting. Regarding the UPS I recently installed a machine with COM1 as dialin and COM2 attached to a ups using APC software. As soon as the machine went to multi user mode it ran down again and I traced it to the UPS - so had I connected the UPS to the incorrect port? No! when I swapped ports a dialin test also ran the machine down! It appeared that the APS software was listening on both Comm ports at the same time!. I didn't sort this out because the user wanted to send banking info from the machine(on COM2) and we needed to dialin on COM1 for support. No problem with this after I uninstalled the APC software. Machine was Compaq ML330.