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Chapter 13: Miscellaneous 151
13 Miscellaneous
Yup, this is the good old "miscellaneous" chapter, that place where we
put stuff which either didn't seem to fit into any other chapter, or which
we figured didn't deserve a chapter of its own. So here we go.
13.1 Things to Make Fnordadel Work or Work Better
Most of the programs we mention in this section are available on RT and
secret. If you can't find them anywhere else, phone one of our systems.
See Appendix A [Fnordadel Support], page 170.
Here are a few things you will *absolutely need* to avoid trouble:
o If you have a hard drive, TOS 1.4 (or greater, like TOS 1.6 in the
STE), or both, make sure you have foldr100.prg installed in your AUTO
boot folder. You may not need foldr100.prg if you have access to
another program that does a similar function, for example Revolver from
Intersect Software or the hard drive boot handler supplied with newer
ICD host adaptor-based hard drives. Both of these products allow you
to allocate buffers for extra folders, a necessary thing due to bugs in
TOS. Even if you don't have a hard drive, TOS 1.4 and 1.6 will need
these extra buffers because of bugs they have.
o If you have TOS 1.4 or greater, you must also have poolfix3.prg
installed in your `auto' boot folder. These versions of TOS have
some bugs that are corrected by the poolfix program, so make sure
it is correctly installed before going any further. We also include
poolfix4, which is a version of poolfix3 with hacks to permit it to run
in any position in your auto folder. (poolfix3 likes to be first, but
so do some other auto programs.) poolfix4 is *NOT* from Atari; it was
done by somebody else. Therefore, use it at your own risk.
o If you have TOS 1.4 or greater, and wish to run your system with a
high-speed modem, you will need to install tos14fx2.prg in your AUTO
folder. This Atari fix solves a glitch with RTS/CTS flow control,
something fairly necessary at speeds of 9600 bps and higher.
Here are some things you will probably want, to make life nicer:
o If you only have 512K of RAM, you might want to consider getting an
upgrade to 1MB, especially if you do not own a hard drive. There
are a lot of things that can make running your system easier and more
enjoyable, such as RAMdisks and command shells. But they need memory
to run. Pretty well all models of ST lose about 100K of RAM to GEM and
TOS. Fnordadel itself needs another 200K or so. On a machine with 512K
tops, memory can disappear pretty quickly, leaving little or no room
for the niceties.
o No matter what model of ST you have, and whether you have a hard drive
or not, if you do not have a new version of TOS (1.4 or 1.6, the latter
available standard [and only] on the STE machines), then we *highly*
recommend getting a TOS upgrade. Disk performance is *much* improved
Chapter 13: Miscellaneous 152
under newer versions of TOS, although if you are running on floppy
disks you won't notice it much due to their inherently slow access
times and data transfers rates. The new versions of TOS also provide a
lot of other enhancements and fixes that are worth having, especially
if you use the GEM desktop a lot.
o A display ``accelerator'', such as the excellent Quick ST, from Branch
Always Software, is a useful addition. Early versions of Quick ST
are available in the public domain, so try to get ahold of a copy
and try it out. If you like it, you can pick up the commercial
version for about $20. Quick ST provides a very nice speed-up to all
screen display operations used in Fnordadel, and many operations used
in GEM-based programs as well.
13.2 Logging and Debugging
Fnordadel has various ways of logging its actions for your later
perusal. They include the call-log and the net-log. In addition, there
are both normal and network-specific debugging flags for still more useless
information.
13.2.1 The call-log
The call-log is kept in the file `calllog.sys', which is stored in your
#auditdir. It records information about callers, file downloads that may
occur, and system up/down times. It can be defined to document any or all
of these things; see `ctdlcnfg.doc' for precise directions on how. Suffice
it to say that if you define the `ctdlcnfg.sys' variable call-log to be
`1', it will cause a call-log to be kept, documenting system up/down times
as well as caller information, but not file downloads.
When the system is brought up, a line of the form
System brought up <date> @ <time>
will be written to `calllog.sys'. When the system is taken down,
System brought down <date> @ <time>
will be written. And when a user has called, you'll see a line of this
form:
<username> : <date> <in> - <out> (<baud>) [flags]
The meanings are as follows:
username is the name of the user;
date is the date on which he/she called;
in is the user's login time;
out is the user's termination time;
Chapter 13: Miscellaneous 153
baud is the baud rate at which the call was made, or ``console'' if
the login was from the Console;
flags documents anything unusual about the call. The following flags
are defined:
+ New user.
R User was denied access to the system due to
a login restriction (see Section 10.2.11 [Login
restrictions], page 139).
P The user was punted off by the use of the [P]oll
command from the Sysop's Net menu.
e An event punted the user off (see Chapter 7 [Events],
page 93).
t The user timed out (meaning that he went for about 3
minutes without hitting a key).
k The user was Killed while online (see [K]ill user in
Section 5.2 [User Status Commands], page 80).
p The user did a .T(erminate) P(unt), which restores
all of his non-vital settings to their pre-call
state.
s The user did a .T(erminate) S(tay). This means that
he logged off without hanging up; this is a good clue
as to the identity of the next person to login.
G A user on the Console was kicked off when carrier was
detected; this happens if you're on the Console and
you use `^L M' instead of [T]erminate.
D The user unceremoniously disconnected without using
[T]erminate. This doesn't hurt anything, but it's
bad style.
E The user was an ``EVILE'' user; he entered more
than a tolerable number of consecutive bad commands,
meaning that either
1. he's *really* clueless, or
2. he had extreme line noise problems.
r The user was punted by having the modem reinitialised
on him; this is accomplished by using [R]einitialise
from the Sysop menu.
c The user called, but was denied access to the
system due to exceeding the maxcalls limit; see
Section 10.2.4 [Calls per day], page 135.
Chapter 13: Miscellaneous 154
T The user was denied