Re: milis, MAXHOSTNAMELEN, networking reading...

[Robert Millan]

On Sun, Dec 01, 2002 at 04:35:40PM +0700, Budi Rahardjo wrote:
> Questions:
> 1. what's the difference between these two milis (mailing lists)?
>    - debian-hurd@lists.debian.org
>    - help-hurd@gnu.org
>    the type of msg is similar. Should I crosspost?

help-hurd is for general help and debian-hurd for help on Debian porting
stuff or Debian-specific issues.

> 2. where should MAXHOSTNAMELEN be defined in the include files
>    <netdb.h> ?
>    and what's the value? 64?
>    (i am trying to compile a program which requires that)

MAXHOSTNAMELEN is not mandated by POSIX, and the GNU system doesn't define it.

You should fix the code to allocate the hostname string dynamicaly
#ifndef MAXHOSTNAMELEN. This site has information about MAXHOSTNAMELEN and
other porting issues:

http://hurd.gnufans.org/bin/view/Hurd/PortingIssues#MAXHOSTNAMELEN

> 3. where can I read more information on Hurd details (especially
>    the networking part and settrans)?
>    I am confused with "settrans", /servers directory, etc.
>    (not familiar with that)
>    It would be nice if the reading materials are for beginners. ;-)

/servers is a directory containing nodes where system servers are attached.
For example, when an application want to access the network, it (the C library)
will perform filesystem operations on /servers/socket/2

maybe the FAQ (http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/faq.en.html) has something
about it.

> 4. I am still confused with how GNU/Hurd handles file systems.
>    ie. why mount crashed without arguments,

this is a known bug, but we don't care much as we use settrans directly. feel
free to debug it and try to fix it :)

>        why df: cannot read table of mounted filesystems

df relies on mtab to know the list of mounted filesystems. for now you can
only check a filesystem manualy as parameters. eg: df /

>        no mtab

on GNU, base servers like ext2fs (which are part of the Hurd) are not in a
centralised list but rather they found as attached translators of already
known node. This makes it hard to obtain a list of all filesystems. IIRC
someone was working on an mtab translator for that.

-- 
Robert Millan

"5 years from now everyone will be running
free GNU on their 200 MIPS, 64M SPARCstation-5"

              Andrew S. Tanenbaum, 30 Jan 1992