Welcome to the party.

On Mar 10, 2014, at 10:41 , arnold@skeeve.com wrote:

> 0. How to see my IP address? Cat a file in /net/... somewhere?

As Charles said, 'cat /net/ipselftab'. You most likely want the lines
with 'u' in the flags filed (third column), which will most likely include
just the loopback address and your "real" address.

> 1. How to change the hostname - just edit /rc/bin/termrc and choose
>   whatever I want to echo into /dev/sysname?  Will that get reflected
>   back out to the corporate net via DHCP?

You could do that. The "right" way to do it is make your ndb
database in /lib/ndb map your ip address to the sysname you want.
Take a look at the examples in there and ndb(6) and see if that gets
you what you're after.

I'm not sure what your second sentence means. DHCP clients don't
broadcast changes out. If you want that server to advertise things,
you'll have to look there.

> 2. How to use DHCP to get to the corporate DNS servers?  (This worked
>   pretty much OOTB on the labs dist, but I think that 9atom will be
>   the better match for the work we want to do.)  Right now all
>   hostname lookups (via ping) fail.

I'm not sure why this would behave differently. Check if the local dns
resolver is running; 'ps | grep dns' and 'ls /srv/dns' should both give
positive results. If either one doesn't, it's not running; rm any stale
/srv/dns and re-start it with 'ndb/dns -r'.

I don't know that VBox's NAT will do anything helpful with the dhcp
requests, though.

> 3. I would like to generate a PDF (or even .PS file) of Volume 1 of the
> manual. What's in the dist has dates from over 10 years ago. I tried
> running 'mk print.out' in the manual directory (as glenda) but got
> an error.  (Erik - can you do that automatically as part of your build
> process? :-)  So. How can I produce such a file suitable for duplex
> printing? (Bonus points if the intro(N) page of each section comes
> out first. :-)

What error did you get? I just tried that on my (slightly out-of-date)
9atom installation (as myself) and it worked fine. The resulting
print.out is troff output; lp can give you PostScript from that.

You could also buy a lovely bound copy of both volumes from Vita
Nuova. :-) Hard copy is still very nice from time to time.

> 4. How to do the moral equivalent of shutdown -h now?

'fshalt -h'. I'm not confident the -h part will do much in Virtual Box.

Have fun.