SUBMISSION: VARIOUS SOFTWARE ITEMS FROM COMPASSION INTERNATIONAL 12-Nov-1988 Submitted by: Ken Richardson Compassion International PO Box 7000 Colorado Springs, CO 80933 (719) 594-9900 This software is made available to the public with no warranties, guarantees, or liability for its use or any consequences thereof. After all, it's free. However, I wouldn't submit it if I didn't think it worked correctly. And the code written at our site tends to be well-structured, efficient, clean, and debugged. If you have any questions or comments, you can find me at the address or phone number listed above. I generally don't mind brief phone calls. However, I'm not easy to get by phone. Leave a message, or I probably won't return your call. (I'd assume it was a sales call.) This submission contains my "standard" DECUS contribution. Some items have been upgraded since the last Fall DECUS tape. Some have not. CLOSE_VMS_ACCT.COM We use this command procedure to close our VMS accounting files every month. This facilitates usage analysis and archiving of accounting data by month. Nothing fancy, but if you don't have it, here it is. CONCATENATE_SIXEL.COB This is a new program this year. It concatenates SIXEL graphs side-by-side. At our site, we do Datatrieve graphs of CPU performance statistics. Lots of them. So I wrote this program to minimize paper by printing these graphs in two columns. First we run our REGIS graphs through RETOS, which gives us SIXEL graphs. Then we run the SIXEL graphs through this program. CONCATENATE_SIXEL.EXE This is the executable version of CONCATENATE_SIXEL.COB. CONCATENATE_SIXEL_EXAMPLE.COM This little command procedure shows the basics of using CONCATENATE_SIXEL. COUNTREC.EXE I got tired of copying files to the null device in order to find out how many records they contain (copy/log file.dat nl:), which can be quite slow and resource-intensive with large files, so I wrote this simple record-counting program. If you define it as a foreign command, you can specify the input file on the command line. Otherwise, it prompts you. COUNT_RECORDS.COM This procedure allows wild-carded counting with COUNTREC.EXE. We have a COUNT command defined as @CI$COMMAND:COUNT_RECORDS.COM, which lets us type "COUNT filespec" to count records in a bunch of files. DIALUPINI.EXE We use US-ROBOTICS hayes-compatible modems on our dialups (the kind that use the AT command set). They work fine, and we use the same lines both for dialing in and for dialing out (I only mention that because I saw someone complain in the pageswapper that you can't do it). However, when the modems power up, they default to sending useful information to VMS (like "RING" and "CONNECT") every time someone dials in. The only problem is that VMS doesn't find it all that useful. So we run DIALUPINI.EXE to tell the modems not to be quite so useful; they're much more useful that way. DIALUPINI.EXE expects a logical name (DIALUP) to point to the port that needs to be reset, and it expects you to already have allocated the port and set the appropriate speed (assuming you are using autobaud on the port). You might need a privilege to allocate the dialup port, depending on how your ports and system parameters are set. I think it's SYSPRV. For more info about DIALUPINI.EXE, see INIT_DIALUPS.COM. DROIDS.EXE This game lets you get chased by robots on a 24x40 field. Only in a weak moment will I confess who wrote it. (I'm also not telling which language it's written in; no, it's not BASIC.) However, it runs quite efficiently, using only one QIO per screen update and one per input. It requires write access to a ci$games directory, which is where it stores the "droids champions" list (droids.dat). If more than one player will be using the same droids.dat file, you need to SET FILE/PROT=W:RW to the file after the first player creates it. EMPTY.SIXEL This "empty" sixel graph is used by CONCATENATE_SIXEL_EXAMPLE.COM. It is used as the "left-hand" graph in a concatenation operation in order to indent a SIXEL graph. It has the minimum SIXEL codes needed by CONCATENATE_SIXEL for a successful concatenation operation. ENPAGE.DOC This documentation file describes the ENPAGE utility to some non-zero degree. For more info, see ENPAGE.EXE or read ENPAGE.DOC. (I just realized that I'm documenting documentation. This might be the first meta-documentation that I've ever written.) ENPAGE.EXE When we got our nifty new LN03 laser printers, we needed a way to put all that power in the hands of our office staff. ENPAGE is how we did it. In naming ENPAGE, I was inspired by the writer of that venerable and ever-useful ENTAB utility, which we use extensively for on-line reports. ENPAGE reformats a text document, adjusting margins (left, right, top, & bottom), pitch (both vertical & horizontal), orientation (portrait or landscape), point-size, and stuff like that. It compensates for imbedded tabs regardless of the left margin you specify. If you've never encountered that problem, please ignore the previous sentence. For people who write letters, ENPAGE can optionally output the first page separately from the rest of the document (we have a dedicated letterhead printer). ENPAGE output can be directed either to devices or to files. ENPAGE output is suitable primarily for LN03 laser printers (it inserts LN03 control sequences into the results). To use the output on some other printer, you'd probably have to edit the device control sequences out of the first and last lines of the output files. FORCEX.EXE Have you ever had a program get into an infinite loop? Well, neither have I, but just in case it ever happens, this program will exercise the VMS system services just enough to list out all the processes on the system and ask you if you want to force-exit any of them. It's not any fantastic new discovery, but it does have the advantage of stopping just the current image rather than the entire process. The process returns to the $ if it's interactive, or to the next line in the command procedure if it's batch. FORCEX requires WORLD privilege, GROUP privilege, or the same username, depending on the target process. INIT_DIALUPS.COM We have three dialup lines; they are known by system-wide logicals ci$dialup_1, ci$dialup_2, and ci$dialup_3. We initialize the modems on those lines during system startup and once per hour (in case someone has been using a modem and left it an a non-standard condition). The INIT_DIALUPS.COM command procedure looks for all devices pointed to by ci$dialup_n. For each such unallocated device, INIT_DIALUPS.COM allocates the device, sets the speed, initializes the modem (using DIALUPINI.EXE), and deallocates the device. LASER2.COM This is the procedure that drives the ENPAGE utility. Actually, at our site we have another procedure that provides novice users with somewhat simple access to rather sophisticated printer characteristics on several printers throughout the office, including our plain-bond laser printer. However, LASER2.COM shows the basics of using ENPAGE.EXE when driving a letterhead/plain-bond printer combination. LOCK_TERMINAL.EXE This is a simple program that accepts and verifies a password, then locks your terminal until you type the password again. Useful for leaving an account logged in while you go away for a couple of minutes. It traps CONTROL-C and CONTROL-Y. However, if you are logged-in remotely using $SET HOST, CONTROL-Y could still be used by a malicious user to return to your original process on the local node. For this reason, I use it mainly on local nodes. REMINDPRT.COM This is a simple command procedure to provide access to REMINDPRT.EXE. REMINDPRT.EXE Are you using the REMINDER utility that has been on recent DECUS tapes? We are, and we needed more flexibility in printing out reminders, so we wrote a program to print simple calendars from the reminder file. No REMINDER user should be without it. Output goes to CI$OUTPUT. REMRESCHD.EXE One of the annoying things about REMINDER is that it deletes old reminders automatically, even if you never got to see it. Well, every night right after midnight I run REMRESCHD.EXE to reschedule old reminders up to today. That way REMINDER becomes a to-do list that won't let me forget a reminder unless I explicitly delete it. Caution: If your login.com automatically displays your reminders ($REMIND ME) like mine does, you need to jump over that line when f$mode is "BATCH" so your midnight rescheduling job can run REMRESCHD on your reminder file before REMINDER gets to it. SHUT_LOGS.COM We use this command procedure to close our OPERATOR.LOG file nightly and open a new one. It also closes our database monitor logfiles, which are produced by VAX DBMS. It resubmits itself nightly, skipping weekends automatically. Again, nothing fancy, but if you don't have it, here it is. For some reason, the VMS developers wrote the $REPLY/LOG command to require a terminal as its sys$command device. Therefore, in order to shut OPERATOR.LOG, this procedure temporarily grabs the operator console as its sys$command device. It wouldn't work from batch unless it did some sort of trick like this. SYSTATUS.EXE Here's SYSTATUS version 5.0! It's a somewhat flexible system status monitor. We use it all the time at our site. To use it, you just type RUN SYSTATUS at the $. Most commands are one-character (no ). On-line help is available by typing the letter "H" while it is running. Changes since version 4.7 (on the Fall '87 DECUS tape): The highest MAXPROCESSCNT that SYSTATUS can handle has been raised to 2048. The user interface has been upgraded substantially! New info about process jobtype, master/subprocess, and active/dormant characteristics. Also, the ability to selectively include or omit processes based on these characteristics. There are some new parameters for controlling SYSTATUS: - The scan period is now more adjustable. - The threshold for considering a process inactive can be adjusted. - The scanning priority can be adjusted. - Outswapped processes can be optionally forced to inswap for info gathering. - Screen width can be adjusted from within the program. - Page faults can be displayed two ways now: as a "count" or as a "rate." The "rate" display should help prevent crowding of numbers on the screen if page-fault rates are high at your site. (Mark Thistlewaite, this is for you!) - The actual scan period is now displayed in addition to the specified scan period. We have SYSTATUS installed SHARED. It needs GROUP or WORLD privilege to look at processes other than your own. We install it without these, so that only users who normally have these privileges can watch other users' processes. If you want everyone to be able to look at other processes in their UIC group, install it with GROUP. If you want everyone to be able to look at all other processes, install it with WORLD. If you also give it ALTPRI, it temporarily boosts its own priority to 16 during each brief data-collection interval, thus improving the accuracy of the results. It disables control-y before boosting the priority, and restores the previous state of control-y (usually enabled) after dropping back down to the original base priority. If you're running any realtime stuff on your system at priority 16, I suppose you wouldn't want to install SYSTATUS with ALTPRI (nor run it from an account with ALTPRI turned on). For the other 99% of VAX sites, I do recommend that you install it with ALTPRI for the most accurate results. SYSTATUS automatically senses your terminal width and height. If your terminal is in 132-column mode, you get more info than in 80-column mode. If you have a terminal with more or fewer than 24 lines, the display will scroll correctly. This all assumes that you have done a $SET TERMINAL/WIDTH=n/PAGE=n type of command. SYSTATUS does screen output with as few QIOs as possible, usually just one. If it can't display its buffer with one QIO, it tells you why and exits. The reason for the QIO failure is usually EXQUOTA. This can be corrected by increasing the SYSGEN parameter MAXBUF, which I have set at something like 6000 or 7000 for our systems. SYSTATUS3.EXE This is an older version of SYSTATUS for VMS version 3. VMSDOWN.COM VMSDOWNUP.COM We run a fairly secure site. For example, the computer operators don't have many privileges. They do backups from a captive account. They can't read system backup tapes without a special captive account that restores files back where they came from originally. And as a side effect of this kind of security, they can't take VMS down. (Actually, this is a side effect of the granularity of privileges granted by VMS privilege bits, but that's another story.) However, I want my underprivileged operators to be able to take VMS down, or to take VMS down and bring it right back up. This is useful when I've changed a system parameter during prime-time and I want it to take effect ASAP, but the first window for downtime is after my bedtime. VMSDOWN.COM and VMSDOWNUP.COM satisfy this need. They are submitted to a batch queue on hold (submit/hold), and the operator releases them when it is convenient (set queue/entry=#/release). USING COMPASSION INTERNATIONAL SOFTWARE If you use any of the software in this submission, you will probably need to edit our command procedures or define logical names to account for the conventions that we use at Compassion. The items you will probably need to change or define include: LOGICAL NAMES: ci$command The directory that holds our local command procedures. ci$dialup_n The dialup ports at our site (n = 1, 2, 3, etc.). ci$games The directory that holds games and related files. ci$images The directory that holds our local images. ci$input The primary input device for a program. ci$output The primary output device for a program. ci$output_2 The secondary output device for a program. ci$workfiles The intermediate directory commonly used at our site. QUEUE NAMES: laser$print_1 The name of our plain-bond print queue. laser$print_2 The name of our letterhead print queue. normal$batch The name of our priority-4 batch queue. FORM NAMES: letter1 The form type normally mounted on laser$print_2. plain_bond The form type normally mounted on laser$print_1.