Any recent news on Xen support for FreeBSD?

2007-04-02 Thread Jaye Mathisen
The fsmware page is significantly dated, and I just am not sure what's going on. I was just curious if there was a better or updated status available. Thanks for your time. ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list

RadioShack USB/Serial converter on FreeBSD 6.0-stable?

2006-08-19 Thread Jaye Mathisen
Running 6.0-stable as of 8/17. Bought a USB/Serial converter for my notebook from radio shack. Works under windows, but comes on as a ugen0: Prolific Technology Inc. USB-Serial Controller. rev 1.10/3.00, addr. Is there a simple way for me to make this recognizable as a serial interface

Re: fdescfs functional in 6.1?

2006-07-29 Thread Jaye Mathisen
I guess I just expected it to print all character device entries for the file descriptors open by my process. Kind of like the old /dev/fd/1 /dev/fd/2 directories used to be under MAKEDEV... On Fri, Jul 28, 2006 at 11:18:48PM -0500, Dan Nelson wrote: In the last episode (Jul 28), Jaye Mathisen

fdescfs functional in 6.1?

2006-07-28 Thread Jaye Mathisen
I will confess, I have on idea if this is what's supposed to be happening. The OpenBSD spam filter system need access to /dev/fd/7. Man page says that I need to mount the fdescfs to get access. Fine. I'm running 6.1-STABLE. So here's what I see, and it looks very odd: devfs is mounted,

Quotas not working in 6.1+?

2006-06-24 Thread Jaye Mathisen
Quotas don't seem to be working. Or whatever I did in 5.x that worked fine has subtly changed in such a way that I can't see the documentation differences. From single user mode, mount -o userquota -t ufs /dev/ad0s1e /usr mounts fine without any messages, but mount doesn't show it having quota

Panic with 5.4 -- kgdb output included

2005-05-29 Thread Jaye Mathisen
5.4-STABLE from 5/27, repeated panics. Finally got a crashdump, fired up kgdb and: (is there any advantage to booting the kernel.debug instead of the regular kernel? Can't think of one, but possibley...). The box does run several jails. It has been crashing regularly under both

Anybody have a working X config file for 5.3 and x.org under vmware workstation?

2004-12-31 Thread Jaye Mathisen
I've kind of switched to using vmware to host my FreeBSD OS, and usually do everything from the command line. But now I guess I'd like X. There's some old stuff on the vmware site for drivers for older versions of FreeBSD, but I'd like to use 5.3 and x.org... Thanks in advance.

Re: OT, but related...

2004-01-31 Thread Jaye Mathisen
, Brooks Davis wrote: On Thu, Jan 29, 2004 at 12:05:38PM -0800, Jaye Mathisen wrote: Does anybody know of a source of *dual* 48v capable power supplies for ATX/i386 cases? We use FreeBSD extensively for our operation, and everything is great, except I have this awesome 48v battery

OT, but related...

2004-01-30 Thread Jaye Mathisen
Does anybody know of a source of *dual* 48v capable power supplies for ATX/i386 cases? We use FreeBSD extensively for our operation, and everything is great, except I have this awesome 48v battery backed plant, but no good way to use it. I have lots of single source 48v DC supplies, and

IPSEC/NAT/gif interaction question.

2003-09-17 Thread Jaye Mathisen
We seem to have an issue where traffic going over an IPSEC tunnel is getting tunneled, before it hits our NAT process... For example. Node A, running NAT on its external interface sis0 which has an IP of 10.177.1.1 has an interface sis1 which is its internal interface with an IP of

Vinum problem with JBOD on a 3ware?

2001-10-30 Thread Jaye Mathisen
I be stumped: newsfeed-inn# uname -a FreeBSD newsfeed-inn.meganews.com 4.4-STABLE FreeBSD 4.4-STABLE #0: Mon Oct 29 15:08:57 PST 2001 [EMAIL PROTECTED]:/n/FreeBSD/RELENG_4-2001-10-29/src/sys/compile/NEWSFEED-INN i386 Diskcontroller is a 3ware 7800, with 4 maxtor 20GB IDE's on it,

Softupdate gripe...

2001-07-30 Thread Jaye Mathisen
2 500+GB FS's, both filled completely. Filesystem 1K-blocks UsedAvail Capacity Mounted on /dev/twed3d 524698116 524697730 386 100%/d/d0 /dev/twed4d 524698116 524502226 195890 100%/d/d1 newsfeed-inn# rm -f /d/d?/*

3dm utility?

2001-06-11 Thread Jaye Mathisen
A search of the Freebsd hackers mailing list has a mail message from Mike Smith saying that the 3DM utility was available from 3ware, and to go to their site to get it. Their PDF file for 3ware lists FreeBSD as supported. however, when you go to the download section, only Linux and Windows.

md disks more than one from a kldload?

2001-05-18 Thread Jaye Mathisen
I kldload md.ko. First md device comes up just peachy. however, attempts to now create an md1 fail with device not configured. It is not obvious to me what flag needs to be passed or how I can get 3 or more MD disks when using the module. Is the only way to compile it into the kernel with

fsck problem on large vinum volume

2001-01-06 Thread Jaye Mathisen
FreeBSD newsfeed-inn2.meganews.com 4.2-STABLE FreeBSD 4.2-STABLE #2: Fri Jan 5 09:42:37 PST 2001 [EMAIL PROTECTED]:/n/FreeBSD/RELENG_4-2000-12-18/src/sys/compile/NEWSFEED-INN3 i386 I have a 930GB vinum volume newfs -v -i 4194304 /dev/vinum/v-spool went fine. However, I can't fsck

Any actual shipping ATM cards supported by FreeBSD 4.x and higher?

2000-11-23 Thread Jaye Mathisen
Fore systems web site dumps you into Marconi's site, and a search there doesn't find the word ATM. Efficient Networks page doesnt list the card on the products page any more. So barring those 2, which are the only 2 listed in the release notes, where can I get ATM cards that will work?

IDE drives doing BBR?

2000-10-04 Thread Jaye Mathisen
Used ABBR on SCSI disks all the time, very nice. Remember reading on hackers somewhere that newer drives like IBM supported this feature. I'm getting a few bad blocks on a 75GB IBM drive (at least according to the ata driver), and rather than replacing it and moves on, the disk basically

Anybody know the OS in the Maxtor MAXAttach products?

2000-09-27 Thread Jaye Mathisen
One of the comments on the side is: "Caching file system with Soft Update technology". Sounds vaguely BSD'ish. Maybe even FreeBSD'ish. Just curious. To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message

Re: looking for microuptime went backwards victims...

2000-09-15 Thread Jaye Mathisen
I get it on my newsserver pretty much every night when expire runs. 12 IDE drives on 3 Promise controllers. I was just actually about to replace the MB, thinking it was just something freaky or unstable. I will try the patch. On Mon, 4 Sep 2000, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote: I'm looking for

Re: SYM driver for Compaq 5500 Xeon?

2000-09-15 Thread Jaye Mathisen
I"ll try that route, but I'd rather not. On Fri, 15 Sep 2000, [ISO-8859-1] GĂ©rard Roudier wrote: On Fri, 15 Sep 2000, Jaye Mathisen wrote: Compaq Proliant 5500, with the on-board NCR SCSI: I get: pci0: unknown card (vendor=0x0e11, dev=0xa0f0) sym0: 875 port blahblah

How many -k's does a build need?

2000-09-08 Thread Jaye Mathisen
Just noticed this little oddity while building XFree86-4, from ports supped today: make -k -f xmakefile all root 17383 0.0 0.2 628 244 p6 I+6:30AM 0:00.00 (sh) root 36617 0.0 0.5 1076 680 p6 I+6:51AM 0:00.05 make -k -k CDEBUGFLAGS= all root 36618 0.0 0.2 628

Anyway to ipfw filter based on MAC address?

2000-08-28 Thread Jaye Mathisen
I would love to be able to filter ipfw traffic based on more than just IP. Anybody done anything like this? To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message

Re: Anyway to ipfw filter based on MAC address?

2000-08-28 Thread Jaye Mathisen
wrote: What else do you want to filter by? did you read man ipfw? it should tell you all about it. you can filter by uid, type of packets, source, origin, etc.. -Simon On Mon, 28 Aug 2000 18:03:58 -0700 (PDT), Jaye Mathisen wrote: I would love to be able to filter ipfw traffic based

Re: Anyway to ipfw filter based on MAC address?

2000-08-28 Thread Jaye Mathisen
to ask to see if somebody else has hacked it in, even if the command name isn't exactly descriptive... On Mon, 28 Aug 2000, Bill Fumerola wrote: On Mon, Aug 28, 2000 at 07:02:03PM -0700, Jaye Mathisen wrote: Just exactly what I said in the Subject. I want to filter on the ethernet MAC address

-stable message... Which param

2000-07-17 Thread Jaye Mathisen
newsfeed-inn2# Jul 17 10:14:07 newsfeed-inn2 /kernel: pmap_collect: collecting pv entries -- suggest increasing PMAP_SHPGPERPROC Don't see this one in LINT. Anybody have any wild guesses as to good values? newsfeed-inn2# sysctl -a | grep shm kern.ipc.shmmax: 4194304 kern.ipc.shmmin: 1

RE: Funky scheduler stuff under heavy I/O.

2000-06-30 Thread Jaye Mathisen
Well, I ran it by Soren, he didn't think so. And Originally when I noticed it, I thought it was vinum (although I'm not using vinum in this case), and mentioned it to greg, and he was leaning that way as well... I'm not sure I buy the controller argument anyway. For each pair of drives on

vinum and superblocks.

2000-06-29 Thread Jaye Mathisen
Not sure what the right thing to do here is, or even if it's a real problem, but: I have 8 75GB IBM drives striped in a big raid 0 for monkeying with. newfs -i 131072 -v /dev/vinum/bighonkindisk seems to very nicely put all the data that newfs write out on to the first disk... It least, only

Funky scheduler stuff under heavy I/O.

2000-06-29 Thread Jaye Mathisen
Noticing something a tad odd here, under 4.0-stable, as of 6/27. 8 identical drives, (all IDE, all connected to identical IDE PCI controllers). 8 parallel DD's started at the same type creating 2GB cycbuffs (as fast as can put them in the background). (dd if=/dev/zero bs=1m count=2000

Has anybody looked at RAID-5 vinum performance on the whole system?

2000-06-13 Thread Jaye Mathisen
I was just curious what people's thoughts were on the potential "total system throughput" (whatever you choose it to be), wrt using software RAID. It would seem that software RAID would just kill big chunks of cache, especially CPU cache, moving lots of data throught it to calcuate CRC's.

Re: Promise Fasttrack RAID controller

2000-06-12 Thread Jaye Mathisen
I have many of them up and running under 4.0, but they will only function as normal IDE controllers, not "RAID". As to teh BIOS issue, make a stripe, then make your partition that you're using not stomp on the end of the drive, and it won't overwrite that gook that the promise sticks out there.

Odd dir-cache #'s with Samba and moving files...

2000-06-07 Thread Jaye Mathisen
I wish I would've grabbed a screen shot while it was happening, but I didn't. In any case, a fairly recent 4.0-stable (last couple weeks), and samba 2.0.7. The FreeBSD box is doing nothing, except smb, and running systat -vmstat 1 in a telnet session. From my NT box, I was moving a bunch of

Re: 40gig IDE drives?

2000-06-02 Thread Jaye Mathisen
I have 2 maxtor 40GB's running off a Promise FastTrak 66 under 4.0-stable, and it's working fine, except for one teensy problem. vinum (striping them), apparently overwrote whatever the promise uses to track them as part of a stripe set... So on reboot, I have to hit an F2 configure, because

Re: 40gig IDE drives?

2000-06-02 Thread Jaye Mathisen
Lehey wrote: On Thursday, 1 June 2000 at 23:56:44 -0700, Jaye Mathisen wrote: I have 2 maxtor 40GB's running off a Promise FastTrak 66 under 4.0-stable, and it's working fine, except for one teensy problem. vinum (striping them), apparently overwrote whatever the promise uses to track

NFS problems on 4.0-stable.

2000-05-18 Thread Jaye Mathisen
UDP v2 mounts, Netapp Filer. Getting a fair # of: got bad cookie vp 0xd24bf1c0 bp 0xc9090500 got bad cookie vp 0xd24bfda0 bp 0xc906ceb0 on the console, and it seems to lock the machine up for several minutes when it does. Then it comes back to life, and cranks for a while... Not sure where

Re: vinum raid5 panics

2000-04-18 Thread Jaye Mathisen
Same here, I'm running 4 disks RAID-0'd under 4.0-current for Diablo, and it's running fine. Haven't updated anythign to RAID-5 support yet. On Tue, 18 Apr 2000, Jesper Skriver wrote: On Tue, Apr 18, 2000 at 09:32:34PM +0200, Soren Schmidt wrote: It seems Chad David wrote: I just put

Re: T1 / E1 PCI card for FreeBSD?

2000-02-08 Thread Jaye Mathisen
I have several of the etinc cards. If you can live with Dennis's rather curt manner, they're perfectly fine cards. I'm going to get one of the LMC boards though, integrated CSU/DSU would be nice, and possibly save a few bucks. ET has a bandwidth manager that works very nicely, and is a heck

pw bug

2000-01-18 Thread Jaye Mathisen
Running a relatively recent 3.4-STABLE: If you use the -V option to specify an alternate master.passwd/conf file location, then the -m option apparently doesn't work. I get users added to my alt pw file, but no home dir creation. Removing the -V /altdir option adds them to

4 port intel card source?

2000-01-12 Thread Jaye Mathisen
Intel used to have a 4 port 100mbit card in the PRO line. I have lots of the duals and they work fine with FreeBSD, but need the 4 porter for a 1U case... Anybody know of a supplier or can sell me one? It would be much appreciated... To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with

Overriding NPROC w/o bumping maxusers?

1999-09-29 Thread Jaye Mathisen
What's the danger in changing the NPROC define in param.c to be ifdef'd, and an option in the kernel config file? it looks like the only way to change the # of allowed processes is via changing maxusers, but is that only by convention?Or is there some other reason I can't override it?

systat -- The alternate system clock has died...

1999-09-02 Thread Jaye Mathisen
Hmph. Fired up systat on a recently supped 3.2-stable box (aug 30). Typed :vm, and the screen cleared, it drew the labels, then sat there for a few seconds, then said: The alternate system clock has died, reverting to pigs display. However, that display shows no useful info either.

Re: Minor patches to pwd_mkdb

1999-09-01 Thread Jaye Mathisen
18:29:58 MST, Jaye Mathisen wrote: Got tired of the dinky cachesize for pwd_mkdb, especially since vipw doesn't take advantage of the -u or -s options. Vipw doesn't take advantage of the -u option? I must have read through the code too fast. Dramatically helps on those 10-15k line

Re: Minor patches to pwd_mkdb

1999-09-01 Thread Jaye Mathisen
Why is it OK for top to do it, but not pwd_mkdb? I probably end up updating my OS faster than I add users to my password file... Tweak the cache to 32MB's, and never touch it again, regardless of how big your passwd file is... On Wed, 1 Sep 1999, Mike Smith wrote: Got tired of the

Minor patches to pwd_mkdb

1999-08-31 Thread Jaye Mathisen
Got tired of the dinky cachesize for pwd_mkdb, especially since vipw doesn't take advantage of the -u or -s options. So here a couple patches that make the cachesize tweakable from make.conf. Dramatically helps on those 10-15k line password files. I would appreciate it if somebody would at

Minor patches to pwd_mkdb

1999-08-31 Thread Jaye Mathisen
Got tired of the dinky cachesize for pwd_mkdb, especially since vipw doesn't take advantage of the -u or -s options. So here a couple patches that make the cachesize tweakable from make.conf. Dramatically helps on those 10-15k line password files. I would appreciate it if somebody would at

Re: Anybody cobbled together a getpwent() that uses libradius?

1999-08-20 Thread Jaye Mathisen
: On Fri, 20 Aug 1999, Jaye Mathisen wrote: While whatever happens with PAM and LDAP, and all those great things, I would like to validate passwords via Radius... It would be most convenient if it was just in getpwent()... This is the wrong place to put it - see the pam_radius module

Anybody cobbled together a getpwent() that uses libradius?

1999-08-20 Thread Jaye Mathisen
While whatever happens with PAM and LDAP, and all those great things, I would like to validate passwords via Radius... It would be most convenient if it was just in getpwent()... To Unsubscribe: send mail to majord...@freebsd.org with unsubscribe freebsd-hackers in the body of the message

Re: Anybody cobbled together a getpwent() that uses libradius?

1999-08-20 Thread Jaye Mathisen
: On Fri, 20 Aug 1999, Jaye Mathisen wrote: While whatever happens with PAM and LDAP, and all those great things, I would like to validate passwords via Radius... It would be most convenient if it was just in getpwent()... This is the wrong place to put it - see the pam_radius module

Re: OpenLDAP tests?

1999-08-18 Thread Jaye Mathisen
On Wed, 18 Aug 1999, Steven Ames wrote: Thanks! I'll check the site (but would appreciate your sending it to me also). -Steve On Tue, 17 Aug 1999, Jaye Mathisen wrote: There is a patch that fixes this, I found it, and submitted a bug report on their web page. I don't have it

Re: OpenLDAP tests?

1999-08-18 Thread Jaye Mathisen
There is a patch that fixes this, I found it, and submitted a bug report on their web page. I don't have it handy, but if you go to www.openldap.org and to their faq-o-matic, and it should be in there. I'll see if I can find it and send it to you in the mean time. On Tue, 17 Aug 1999, Steven

Re: OpenLDAP tests?

1999-08-18 Thread Jaye Mathisen
Ames wrote: Thanks! I'll check the site (but would appreciate your sending it to me also). -Steve On Tue, 17 Aug 1999, Jaye Mathisen wrote: There is a patch that fixes this, I found it, and submitted a bug report on their web page. I don't have it handy, but if you go

Re: OpenLDAP tests?

1999-08-17 Thread Jaye Mathisen
There is a patch that fixes this, I found it, and submitted a bug report on their web page. I don't have it handy, but if you go to www.openldap.org and to their faq-o-matic, and it should be in there. I'll see if I can find it and send it to you in the mean time. On Tue, 17 Aug 1999, Steven

RE: Squid - a bug in src/sys/kern/uipc_socket.c

1999-07-22 Thread Jaye Mathisen
Maybe it could be made a sysctl knob... On Thu, 22 Jul 1999, Jason Young wrote: It's been committed before, and broke many things (X and CVSup come to mind). I have it compiled in locally on a few machines but it's definitely not suitable for general distribution until a solution is

RE: Squid - a bug in src/sys/kern/uipc_socket.c

1999-07-22 Thread Jaye Mathisen
Maybe it could be made a sysctl knob... On Thu, 22 Jul 1999, Jason Young wrote: It's been committed before, and broke many things (X and CVSup come to mind). I have it compiled in locally on a few machines but it's definitely not suitable for general distribution until a solution is found

Re: poor ethernet performance?

1999-07-21 Thread Jaye Mathisen
Perhaps I'm missing something obvious, but since switches forward packets selectively per port, I would think it would be hard to sniff packets on any port, w/o administrative access to the switch to tell it to mirror data to a different port. ie, if I'm plugged into port 1, I can't see

Re: poor ethernet performance?

1999-07-21 Thread Jaye Mathisen
On Wed, 21 Jul 1999, Matthew Dillon wrote: :Perhaps I'm missing something obvious, but since switches forward packets :selectively per port, I would think it would be hard to sniff packets on :any port, w/o administrative access to the switch to tell it to mirror :data to a different

Re: poor ethernet performance?

1999-07-21 Thread Jaye Mathisen
Perhaps I'm missing something obvious, but since switches forward packets selectively per port, I would think it would be hard to sniff packets on any port, w/o administrative access to the switch to tell it to mirror data to a different port. ie, if I'm plugged into port 1, I can't see traffic

Re: poor ethernet performance?

1999-07-21 Thread Jaye Mathisen
On Wed, 21 Jul 1999, Matthew Dillon wrote: :Perhaps I'm missing something obvious, but since switches forward packets :selectively per port, I would think it would be hard to sniff packets on :any port, w/o administrative access to the switch to tell it to mirror :data to a different port.

What good Xeon boards are people using?

1999-07-21 Thread Jaye Mathisen
Need to build a good fast single processor server running FreeBSD 3.2. Uptime far more important than absolute maximum speed. However, pricing dell/compaq, etc, seems on the high side. What good boards are people using in the trenches? To Unsubscribe: send mail to majord...@freebsd.org with

Buildworld failing from 3.1 to 3-2.stable...

1999-07-19 Thread Jaye Mathisen
I have a box running 3.1-stable that I wanted to update. sups fine, but the build dies in login with: === usr.bin/login cc -O -pipe -static -Wall -DLOGIN_ACCESS -DLOGALL -I/usr/obj/n/FreeBSD/RELENG_3/src/tmp/usr/include -c /n/FreeBSD/RELENG_3 /src/usr.bin/login/login.c

Buildworld failing from 3.1 to 3-2.stable...

1999-07-19 Thread Jaye Mathisen
I have a box running 3.1-stable that I wanted to update. sups fine, but the build dies in login with: === usr.bin/login cc -O -pipe -static -Wall -DLOGIN_ACCESS -DLOGALL -I/usr/obj/n/FreeBSD/RELENG_3/src/tmp/usr/include -c /n/FreeBSD/RELENG_3 /src/usr.bin/login/login.c

tee option on ipfw?

1999-07-18 Thread Jaye Mathisen
The man page says the tee option on ipfw is not yet supported. I'm wondering if that is still the case as of 3.2-stable, or if the doc is just out of date. I would like to make a copy of incoming UDP packets to a specific port for some testing. tee seems like an easy way to go. To

tee option on ipfw?

1999-07-18 Thread Jaye Mathisen
The man page says the tee option on ipfw is not yet supported. I'm wondering if that is still the case as of 3.2-stable, or if the doc is just out of date. I would like to make a copy of incoming UDP packets to a specific port for some testing. tee seems like an easy way to go. To

VMWare plug/quickie tests.

1999-07-15 Thread Jaye Mathisen
I've been running VM Ware under NT for a few days now, booting FreeBSD and other OS's. In some quick testing: The host machine is NT 4.0, SP5, 384MB RAM, dual 450 PII's. The guest OS is FreeBSD 3.2-RELEASE, configured with the VMWARE 512MB disk, and 32MB RAM allocated Compiling a

VMWare plug/quickie tests.

1999-07-15 Thread Jaye Mathisen
I've been running VM Ware under NT for a few days now, booting FreeBSD and other OS's. In some quick testing: The host machine is NT 4.0, SP5, 384MB RAM, dual 450 PII's. The guest OS is FreeBSD 3.2-RELEASE, configured with the VMWARE 512MB disk, and 32MB RAM allocated Compiling a generic

Anybody tried one of these VXA tape drives with FreeBSD?

1999-07-13 Thread Jaye Mathisen
Look fairly robust: http://vxatape.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message

Anybody tried one of these VXA tape drives with FreeBSD?

1999-07-13 Thread Jaye Mathisen
Look fairly robust: http://vxatape.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majord...@freebsd.org with unsubscribe freebsd-hackers in the body of the message

Where are the Disk on Chip drivers?

1999-07-06 Thread Jaye Mathisen
I just got a DOC2K in, and am anxious to play with it. I know Poul had done some work with it, but his web page doesn't have a link to it, and I cannot find his original email. The reference in freebsd-small doesn't contain an URL... Any help appreciated. I want to run under 3.2-stable.

Anybody using the Efficient Networks ATM PCI adapter?

1999-06-24 Thread Jaye Mathisen
I see it's supported, but I'm curious if anybody is using it. If so, I'd like to ask a few questions off-line of somebody... Thanks. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majord...@freebsd.org with unsubscribe freebsd-hackers in the body of the message

Re: Matt's Commit status (was Re: 3.2-stable, panic #12)

1999-06-03 Thread Jaye Mathisen
I second this. Even if it's a bit painful, somebody who has been working diligently at this needs to be able to be make their work usable quickly. I would guess that not too many things hinder progress, or quash desire more than fixes to problems languishing. There has to be some middle ground

Re: xl driver for 3Com

1999-05-30 Thread Jaye Mathisen
It is kind of interesting that now the shoe is on the other foot... A few months ago I purchased some sync cards from ET, and had some (and am still having) trouble getting them to work consistently. When I emailed their support dept for help, I got a few curt non-helpful replies, then a