---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Founded December 1988 The Florida SunFlash SunFlash Editor's Monthly Letter SunFlash Digest June 1994 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Electronic Journal For Sun Users Since 1988 John J. Mclaughlin, Publisher & Editor - flash@sun.com ____________________________________________________________________________ 66.01 SunFlash Editor's Monthly Letter From: John J. McLaughlin, SunFlash Editor/Publisher From The Editor Popular SunFlash Articles from March, April, May How To Request A SunFlash Article - Example SunFlash Email addresses Call For Submissions Distribution Options Local Distribution Aliases (371 lines) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subject: From The Editor The monthly digest article has grown so large - over 70k -that I have decided to break it into three parts: table of contents - 1 line summary of each article abstracts of articles - brief summary of each article. There will be multiple articles so that no article exceeds 28k. editor's letter - thoughts from the editor and standard articles (e.g. "Distribution Options", "Local Distribution Aliases", "Popular Articles") I hope that you like this new format for the monthly digest. The feedback to me is that people like the full-text on demand capability. The Full distribution option is fully operational for those people who want all of the articles. I will be attending SunWorld (June 13 to 18) - See ya there! I will continue to produce SunFlash - from my hotel room - with the aid of a Voyager and a PPP link. This is nomadic computing at work! I added a new banner at the top of each article ("The Electronic Journal For Sun Users Since 1988"). Do you think that describes SunFlash well ? Is there anything else that I can do to improve the service ? I welcome your feedback (via email). Sometime in the near future, I will be conducting a brief survey. For each subscriber I would like to know your: o Name o Title (from a list of generic titles like programmer, sys-admin, manager etc) o Company o SunFlash distribution type (newsgroup, mailing list, ftp etc.) o Location (City and Country) o Favorite Color o Lucky Number I am often asked what is the distribution of SunFlash (by #of people, by #of companies, by location, by title.) and this simple survey will help answer those questions. When you get this survey, please take a couple of minutes to answer the questions. I will set up a program to collate the responses, so a standard layout will be encouraged. The survey might loose a few questions before you see it :-). I will post an article with a summary of the results, and I'm sure that I will use the results to improve the service. -johnj John J. McLaughlin SunFlash Editor/Publisher ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subject: Popular SunFlash Articles from March, April, May ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Most Requested Articles from Vol 65 (May 1994) 65.39 New SPARCstation 5 Configuration 65.33 GNU tools "packaged" for Solaris 2.3 65.58 Freeware for a Multimedia Internet 65.51 OPEN LOOK GUI FAQ 01 of 04: General 65.54 OPEN LOOK GUI FAQ 04 of 04: Programs 65.52 OPEN LOOK GUI FAQ 02 of 04: DeskSet 65.53 OPEN LOOK GUI FAQ 03 of 04: XView 65.18 Public Release of X11R6 65.57 BRIEF/vi Compatible GUI Text Editor 65.43 Solaris 1.1.1 Version B Source 65.34 MKS Internet Anywhere Now Shipping Most Requested Articles from Vol 64 (April 1994) 64.19 SunSoft Debuts Solaris 2.4 64.30 Solaris and MS-Windows, DOS, MAC Apps 64.37 Internet Services List (4/1/94) 64.36 The Internet Mall [01 Apr, 94] 64.63 Mosaic Server Product Announcement 64.21 Roadmap For Solaris Distributed Objects 64.02 Solaris 1.1.1 Version B 64.88 INTERNET SHOPPING NETWORK 64.43 Whole Internet User's Guide & Catalog 64.86 The Internet Mall [15 Apr, 94] 64.24 SunSoft: NetWorker for Solaris 64.20 Solaris: UNIX Platform Of Choice Most Requested Articles from Vol 63 (March 1994) 63.60 SMCC Introduces SPARCstation Voyager 63.45 Internet Services List (Mar-01-94) 63.61 Solaris to Run Macintosh Applications 63.80 The Internet Mall: [22 Mar, 94] 63.71 Sun Security Bulletin: #00126, 3/21/94 63.64 STB Takes microSPARC-II to 85 and 100MHz 63.06 New Upgrades To SPARCstation 10 63.72 Solaris x86 Hardware Compatibility Guide 63.81 Internet Multicasting Service 63.44 Solaris 2 SW list 63.79 CERT ADVISORY - utmp vulnerability Subject: How To Request A SunFlash Article - Example ---------------------------------------------------- To obtain the full text to one or more SunFlash articles, simply send their article numbers to the autoresponse alias flashadm@sun.com. Article numbers consist of the Volume Number and the Issue Number. For example, the article "XvM - for moving from XView to Motif", was the 12th issue of Vol 64 (April 1994), so its article number is 64.12 Separate the article numbers with spaces. For example: %mail flashadm@sun.com Subject: 64.12 64.16 ^D % Place the list articles numbers on the same line as the Subject keyword. Separate article numbers with a space (e.g 64.12 64.16) Use a mail program that prompts for a subject line. e.g. mail under Solaris 1.x and mailx under Solaris 2.x. to make sure that the article numbers are in the subject line and not the message body. If Articles Don't Arrive After a Reasonable Time ------------------------------------------------ I get a number of requests that come from sites that do not have their mail system set up properly. Some requests have their return path or the From: lines mangled as they travel through the net. If you suspect that your requested article is not getting to you because of an email address problem, then resubmit and add the keyword "email-to" in the body of the message: %mail flashadm@sun.com Subject: 63.39 63.40 email-to foo%bar@name.domain ^D % Replace foo%bar@name.domain with your email address. Subject: SunFlash Email addresses --------------------------------- flash@sun.com The SunFlash Editor sunflash-info@sun.com Automatic Information About SunFlash info-sunflash@sun.com Automatic Information About SunFlash flashadm@sun.com Administrative Issues flashadm@sun.com Article Requests sunflash-request@sun.com Requests to be addes to the list Subject: Call For Submissions for SunFlash ------------------------------------------ Please help to keep SunFlash useful by providing me with articles of general interest to the Sun community. I plan to post about 100 articles per month to SunFlash. Most of those articles will originate outside of Sun. The kinds of articles that I am looking for are those that would be of interest to a significant percentage of Sun users. E.g. Product announcements, conference agendas, electronic newsletters, articles from and about 'the net' etc. If your company is making product announcements about products that you think many Sun users would be interested in and you do not see those announcements in SunFlash, contact your marketing people and suggest that they forward such announcements to flash@sun.com. Browsing through this month's digest should give you a fair idea of what I am looking for. If you are a writer and are interested in posting a technical article to SunFlash, I will consider such material. As SunFlash is free, I am not in a position to pay for such articles. If there are technical articles available within your company that help expain areas of technology or solutions to problems that your company or its products or services address particularly well, you might consider seeking permission to allow me to post such articles to SunFlash. I can only accept artciles via email. If your job is to help people find solutions to problems and you come across interesting technology or good products that help solve problems, suggest to the vendors of such solutions that they contact me to promote them. (Hint, hint fellow Sun SE's!) Some Sun employees forward internal Sun email messages to their customers although Sun policy prohibits such forwarding. (e.g SunIntros). If there is a need to get the information from internal email messages to customers, then there is a potential SunFlash. For example, I edit SunIntros to make them suitable for Sun customers and then explictly seek reviews of my edits and obtain permission to post the edited SunIntros as SunFlashes from the relevant authors and managers. If you are a Sun employee and you come across material that would be of interest to many Sun users, then please forward such material to me. I will always obtain permission to post such information from the responsible authors or managers before I post it as changes may be required to make such articles 'customer ready'. (e.g. 34.24 'Sun Software Update Release History' which lists the Sun Software Products, their revsion numbers and the date on which they were released). Thanks for your help! -johnj Subject: SunFlash Distribution Options -------------------------------------- I post about 100 SunFlash articles each month. The new 'Abstracts' or digest style articles, such as this one, make it possible for me to post this many articles without drowning everyone in email. However, for those people who want all the articles and are prepared to deal with 100+ articles a month, I have created a new distribution option, Full. This is the first article to be posted to the new Full distribution alias. It took me several weeks to process the flood of requests to be changed from one distribution type to another. Here is a brief description of the various Distribution options: Daily (or direct) - about 1 message per day, including Abstracts type articles - monthly digest Weekly (or indirect) - 1 message per week Monthly - 1 message per month Full (or total or verbose) - all articles. 100+ per month. Often posted in groups of 4 to 10 at a time. - suitable of redistribution via local newsgroups or for local archiving The SunFlash mail headers will indicate which distribution option was used to get SunFlash to you. Note that some mail relaying and some mail-to-news programs drop this information. sunflash-Distribution-Type: Daily or sunflash-Distribution-Type: Weekly or sunflash-Distribution-Type: Full or sunflash-Distribution-Type: Monthly sunflash-Sub-Mailing-List: list name or email address sunflash-Sub-Mailing-List-Requests: email address Please include these headers in all change requests as they help me locate you entry and thus make the requested change. Most people subscribe to the Daily distribution. If you want to have your distribution type changed, please send mail to flash@sun.com. I encourage people to change to the Weekly distribution. The e-mail auto responder works well and by keeping track of which articles are being requested, I get hints about what type of material people find useful. If there are several people at your site who want to subscribe to SunFlash, you make consider creating local distribution aliases. That is, I will send sunflash to an alias at your site and you can locally add/delete/change names in that alias. See the section "Local Distribution Aliases". You may want to suggest to your fellow Sun users who don't subscribe to SunFlash because of the message volume that they may now want to subscribe to the Weekly or Monthly distributions. Please tell your friends and colleagues who have an interest in Sun about SunFlash. Subject: Local SunFlash Distribution Aliases -------------------------------------------- Many organizations have aliases in place for the direct distribution of sunflash within those organizations. Please check if such an alias already exists at your site before sending a request to flash@sun.com. If your site does not have a sunflash redistribution alias in place and there are several people at your site who would be interested in subscribing to SunFlash, please create your own redistribution alias and have that aliases added to the appropriate list. Add your own email address to your redistribution alias. Local redistribution aliases allow local administrators to add/delete/change their own sunflash subcribers with ease. Please do not add subscribers from other organizations to your local redistribution alias. Ask flash@sun.com to add them instead. (It's a lot harder to track down problems if users from one organizations are 'hidden' in the sunflash alias of another.) As there are several SunFlash Distributions options, please consider creating several aliases: #default distribution sunflash: sunflash-daily #daily: about 1 per day, some will be digests sunflash-daily: #weekly: about 1 per week, all will be digests sunflash-weekly: #monthly: about 1 per month, all will be digests sunflash-monthly: #full: about 100 per month - all the articles sunflash-full: Please create 'owner' aliases to redirect sendmail errors to a local guru: # Who gets sunflash error messages that are due to local problems ? # Please include a fully qualified address (i.e. with domainname too) owner-sunflash: guru@yoursite.yourdomain owner-sunflash-daily: owner-sunflash owner-sunflash-weekly: owner-sunflash owner-sunflash-monthly: owner-sunflash owner-sunflash-full: owner-sunflash Rather then editing '/etc/aliases', you can use an include file with one email address per line: #sunflash alias files: daily, weekly, monthly and full sunflash: sunflash-daily sunflash-daily: :include:/home/flash/daily.list sunflash-weekly: :include:/home/flash/weekly.list sunflash-monthly: :include:/home/flash/monthly.list sunflash-full: :include:/home/flash/full.list This use of sendmail 'include' files makes it easy for you to add/delete/change entries without (a) being root, and (b) you don't have to edit /etc/aliases and issue the newaliases command (or update the NIS db). ********************************************************************** For information about SunFlash send mail to info-sunflash@Sun.COM. Subscription requests should be sent to sunflash-request@Sun.COM. Archives are on draco.nova.edu, ftp.uu.net, sunsite.unc.edu, src.doc.ic.ac.uk and ftp.adelaide.edu.au For Gopher and WAIS access: sunsite.unc.edu. (Login as 'gopher' for a simple gopher client, 'swais' for a simple WAIS client (over 500 databases). All prices, availability, and other statements relating to Sun or third party products are valid in the U.S. only. Please contact your local Sales Representative for details of pricing and product availability in your region. Descriptions of, or references to products or publications within SunFlash does not imply an endorsement of that product or publication by Sun Microsystems. Send brief articles (e.g. third party announcements) and include contact information (non-800#, fax #, email, etc) to: John McLaughlin, SunFlash editor, flash@Sun.COM. +1 305 351 4909