Installing X-terminals

Open up the boxes and take inventory. Bring any registration papers, warranty papers to Chandra. If you have memory upgrades to do, open the box and spot the SIMM slot. There is an orientation for the SIMMs. There are also SIMMS for Memory and for booting. We normally boot over the network. So the only SIMM upgrades we will be doing is for data. We do not touch the flash slot.

Power on the X-terminal. Set the keyboard type. There are three types of keyboards we use.

1. LK201/401 Keyboard with the setup key (Ultrix style Escape). The setup key on these keyboards is marked setup.
2. PC Style 101 keyboard with the Pause Key. Shift+Pause works as setup key on these keyboards.
3. Sun Type 5 style keyboard. Alt+Graphics (RHS of SpaceBar) + Help key works as the setup key on these keyboards.

Once the keyboard type is selected, X-terminal will save this information into the non-volatile ram. It then attempts to boot automatically. Halt this process by hitting any key on the keyboard.

Set the boot method to nfs by typing

bmethod nfs 8192

Save this into the non volatile ram by typing NVSAVE. Make sure there is nothing set on the X-terminal when you do this like the IP Number, Subnet mask, Gateway. This is shown in the top right hand corner of the X-terminal screen.

Sometimes you may have to change the ethernet connection type, address or the monitor that is connected to the X-terminals. The commands for these are

boot> sel ethernet
boot> sel monset

They both present a selection of options that you choose from. On the newer models of X-terminals the monset takes a negative number as the option to cycle through and pick automatically first one that syncs the X-terminal to the monitor.

Note down the hardware address. For eg: 08 00 11 05 0d 51. This is shown as the very first line on the top left of the screen.

Assign an IP number for the X-terminal in the subnet where it is being installed. This procedure is explained in adding a machine to Domain Name Service. Sometimes you need to do a kill -HUP Pid of the named process on quark which is our slave name server. Once the name, location of the machine and the IP Address is fixed, add it to this page /web/html/systemins/xterminal.html in the table.

Edit the /etc/bootptab file on the server that will be serving this X-terminal. This entry will make the connection between the Hardware Address, IP number and the bootfile that the X-terminal will be using to boot. The servers that provide boot information are quark, neptune, proton and neutron.

You may need to add this X-terminal to a particular netgroup on neptune. This is done by editing the /etc/yp/netgroup file on neptune. You need to propagate the changes to the Yellow Page database by doing a make in /var/yp area again on neptune. You need to do exportfs -va on the suns or touch /etc/exports on alphas for the nfs daemons to recognize the changes to the netgroup.

If this X-terminal is going to attach to an existing X-terminal server, you need to edit the Xaccess file on that server and restart the XDM server or Dtlogin process. The file is located in /etc/dt/config/Xaccess on the alphas and in /var/adm/xdm/Xaccess on neptune.

This server process is identified by using ps -aef | grep dtlogin on the alphas or ps -aef | grep xdm on the Suns. You need to look for the dtlogin or xdm process that is the parent of the processes specific to displays. You then do a kill -HUP pid on that process for it to reread its Xaccess file.

Now the X-terminal must get served a CDE login screen. To do this edit the xp.cnf file on quark:

1. rsh quark
2. su to root
3. cd /local/tekxp/boot/config
4. vi xp.cnf
5. search the file for the word "xdmcp_connect"

Now find the range that includes the ip address for the terminal just added. If the server that covers this ip range is the one you want then leave it, otherwise break up the range and create a new entry for the X-term. For example, assume we are adding an xterm at 128.227.17.99 and this machine should be served by delray. Do an nslookup on delray and find out that its ip is 128.227.17.123. Here is the original entry that covers 128.227.17.99:

select SUBNET=128.227.17.89-102

xdmcp_server "128.227.17.70

This gets changed to the following three lines:

Further on in the file is a section to determine the amount of memory used to cache fonts. This also needs to be checked. Set the font cache according to this table:

Here is an example for an X-Terminal with 40 megs RAM, again using 128.227.17.99 :

Save the file, and exit vi. Now copy the file to the machine that will serve the X-terminal. In the above example this is delray, so:

You boot the X-terminal. You need to notice any errors in the mounting of the font areas. If everything goes well, the machine will be up and running a CDE or XDM login screen.

If there are any specific modifications you need to make to the X-terminal like presenting a menu of machines or setting up a local printer, you need to modify the xp.cnf file which sits in the tekxp/boot/conf area. This area is located in /quark/apps on quark, /opt on neptune, /local on proton and neutron. This is also the file to modify to assign different servers to different X-terminals using the select command.

Installing CDE

1. The CDE directories are located in /usr/dt and /etc/dt directories. The /usr/dt directory is the system default CDE directory. Anything you would like to override from there you can put it in /etc/dt directory.
2. Quark, HEP01, PROTON, NEUTRON and DELRAY are already setup to be CDE servers with our modifications. You need to duplicate one of these areas on the new servers. The directories you need to copy are /etc/dt and /usr/lib/X11/app-defaults
3. The easiest way to move an entire directory hierarchy is through tar. The commands on hep01 are

cd /etc
tar -cvf /var/tmp/dt.tar dt
cd /usr/lib/X11
tar -cvf /var/tmp/app-defaults.tar app-defaults

4. Login on the newmachine as root. Then do the following.

cd /var/tmp
ftp hep01
cd /var/tmp
binary
get app-defaults.tar
get dt.tar
quit

cd /etc
tar -xvf /var/tmp/dt.tar
cd /usr/lib/X11
tar -xvf /var/tmp/app-defaults.tar

5. Some files in /etc/dt/config tend to be system dependent. For example Xaccess allows X-terminals access to the new machines. The C/sys.dtwmrc file contains the menus for the dtwm. This needs to be modified for the 24 and 17 subnet naming changes like neptune-gw and neptune. This is also the file that needs to be modified when new software is added to add menu entries under the CDE system. We need to come up with a scheme to maintain this file on different subnets and servers consistently along with the global.cshrc file.
6. Make sure /usr/dt/bin is in the path of the users by modifying the /usr/local/bin/global.cshrc if necessary.

Problems with CDE after Upgrading OS

Hopefully you have saved the /etc/dt area before the upgrade. You can also grab it from some other similar machine. The only files that you need to modify are the Xaccess and Xservers which depend on the X-terminals this machine is serving and whether you have a local display or not. It appears that the /usr/dt/config/Xsetup file has several problems on the DEC Alphas. We have to add a paragraph to the /etc/dt/config/Xsetup script to set the backspace key to act as delete. Here is the entry:

      # load the keymap
      if [ -f /var/X11/xdm/keymap_default ]; then
          /usr/bin/X11/xmodmap /var/X11/xdm/keymap_default
      else
         /usr/bin/X11/xmodmap -e "keysym BackSpace = Delete"
      fi

The compression used by the tektronix font distribution on the Xpressware CD is not compatible with the NCD X-terminal software. The solution to this problem is to go the font directories and do the following:

uncompress *.pcf.Z
compress -b 12 *.pcf

We had to do that in almost every directory in the tekxp/boot/fonts area.

The /usr/lib/X11/app-defaults directory gets wiped out when we do a full installation. To restore this we compare individual files in /usr/lib/X11/app-defaults area with the already saved app-defaults area. If the file only exists in the saved area, it is just copied over to the system area. If there are differences, we need to look at them and merge the differences in by hand. The important files that needs to be hand merged are Xmh, Mwm, XTerm, DXMail.