Date   : Sat, 08 Jul 2006 14:41:05
From   : "Ian Wolstenholme" <BBCMailingList@...>
Subject: Re: anybody use awServer?

I have got the Level 4 discs here:

www.BeebMaster.co.uk/downloads/Level4FS.zip

There are 2 800K ADFS disc images which I imagine you will be able
to write to a couple of floppies on the A5000, although I am not sure
how as I can't remember how I made the disc images in the first place,
probably with Omniflop or FDC.

I haven't used awServer but you should be able to manage OK with
Level 4 on the A5000.

As an alternative, if the co-pro is an external cheese wedge then you
could connect it up to the BBC B instead and run Level 2 Econet (or
Level 3 if you have a Winchester or a 1770 interface).

You may be able to persuade the A5000 to run the Level 3 server
whilst running !65Tube, I have "almost" got this to work but it won't
mount the file server disc, either due to not understanding all the
OSWORD calls or because of the difference in drive numbering between
RISC-OS and BBC OS (ie. hard disc = drive 4 in RISC-OS but drive 0
in BBC OS).

Best wishes,



Ian

----- Original Message -----
From: Rob
To:  bbc-micro@...
Sent:  Sat, 08 Jul 2006 11:52:20 +0100
Subject: [BBC-Micro] anybody use awServer?

Well After about two years of trying to get around to it, I finally
have a network on my desk.. Master 128+co-pro+GoMMC, Model B, and an
A5000..  (barely any room for my coffee cup now!)

I've put awServer
<http://www.heyrick.co.uk/econet/othersrv/awserver.html> on the
a5000, and, after discovering the 77 filename limit, added raFS ..

It all seems to work, however restoring the backup gets me lots of
corruption - specifically, files are truncated!  8K ROM images come
out fine, for instance, but 16K images arrive at about 9K in
size...  Larger text files seem to start about half way though.. Hmm...

The backup was made using a prog called "Archive" and is restored
with "GetBack".  (I've yesterday hacked this about a bit to allow me
to start at an arbitrary disc, because errors 15 discs in are not
funny when it takes all day to get there - too many 1K files..)  but
I suspect it's probably something to do with larger files being
copied in chunks, possible an OSGBPB issue with awServer? I know this
worked on an L3 system in 1989..

Somebody did put up some Acorn L4 disc images a while back, but I
never managed to make any sense of the images - couldn't write them
in any format that they were recognised by anything..  Has anybody
had any success with these?


I've also tried Level 3 using the GoMMC as a hard disc, but the
initialiser trashes the hard disc image before it gets anywhere, as
John's patches don't support the OSWORD &72 command &1A - Mode sense,
so it can't get the size of the drive.  I'll have to hack this about
a bit more I think, but it's just so horribly written...
IF blah ELSE UNTIL 0 ... I know GOTO is frowned upon but a sequence
of these just feels so much worse!

I'd rather not use the Master and GoMMC as a fileserver, though, as
it's more  use as a workstation; I've also found using the A5000 was
handy for transferring files off because it'll write standard PC
compatible floppies.


So... sorry it's a bit OT (Where else should I ask?) but has anybody
else had any similar issues with awServer or raFS - I'm not sure
which one is causing the problem - truncating files?

Cheers!

Rob.