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What is Penix?

Penix is that way-cool multitasking Operating System that's a bit

like that other one you might have heard of.. you know, the one

that has the Interthingy running on it. Needlessly complex and

given to falling over at the drop of a hat.

Commands:

cfts completely ##### the system

rcatpar randomly change all the passwords at random

wi whatyouseeisprettypathetic interactiveEditor

edmond page-oriented editor. a step down from a

line-editor, this one treats text as page-sized

chunks.

rofl roll on floor laughing. not so much a system

functions as what the support staff do when you

ask them if they still have last week's backups

on tape somewhere.

ispi shows some of the processes running, some of the

users on the other lines, and sometimes even

gives statistics on CPU usage. it's very

context-sensitive.

sssl suddenly exchange serial lines with another user

pong let the other machines on the net know that

you're there

exorcise terminate a daemon process completely and

utterly. kill it off, every last trace. we're

not kidding here. finito.

Common Penix terms:

walnut the heart of the Penix OS. at compilation, it is

approximately 71 megabytes in size (depending on

whether you have the development system or not),

but this figure regularly oscillates between 67

meg and 8 gig, as the system `breathes'.

It was written in interpreted BASIC, for ease of

modification.

daemon a process that detaches itself from your console

session. unless you redirect the output from

this daemon into a specified file, any output

produced will appear out of various serIOus

lines on the system at the daemon's discretion.

you can terminate a daemon with the exorcise -X

function.

aengel like a daemon, except a bit more polite. an

aengel process will ask before it directs output

to your serIOus line. it will generally do it

anyway, but at least it asks first.

nyemph a daemon process that can migrate from one file

system to another, and will do so if its output

has filled the filesystem that it started on.

slippery little buggers.

maenad like a nyemph task, but a little bit more

attractive.

sprite a very simple background task that does menial

things like flash the cursor colours, play the

sampled `beep' sound when you press control-g on

the keyboard, and make that annoying click on

the floppy drive as the OS checks to see if you

have put in a disk yet.

goelem a very powerful background task. also very

stupid. they are usually started by the system

itself, when the need arises to do something

labour-intensive and boring - so boring, in

fact, than none of the usual background tasks

will touch it. you occasionally find goelem

tasks wandering around after they have finished

their task, too stupid to realise that they HAVE

finished; pretty much all you can do about it is

allocate them a very low time-slice (see the

`motu' command) and hope that they don't get

into any trouble.

caenobites this is something we aren't particularly proud

of here at Sunburne, but we think that you

should know about, in the interests of safety.

we will admit that the circumstances that led us

to developing Penix are slightly unusual, and

that there is quite a bit about this system that

was, er, inherited. We're not saying that we

stole it. but there are large areas of this

system that we know nothing about, but which,

when we remove them, the system stop altogether.

we don't know exactly what caenobite tasks do,

but we have found that you can't kill them; you

can't stop them; you can't even slow them down.

whenever we use the motu command to alter their

timeslice, they completely ignore it (this may

be due to the fact that we think motu's orders

are passed to the rest of the system by the

caenobite tasks). a caenobite task can be

incited to remove other tasks by passing it a

BOX_OPEN message packet, but they are best left

alone. thank god there are usually only about

four of them.

networks the Penix network philosphy is based on a

`Master/Slave' relationship. Systems can be

linked into networks that include hundred of

machines, but generally, inter-machine

communication is dominant/submissive. One

machine makes a begging, whimpering request for

a file from its `Dom', which must then establish

which of its `Subs' has the file. It then issues

a spank_IO order for the file; if the data

packet isn't sent within the system default

timeout period, the Dom issues a whip_IO. If

THAT doesn't work, the Dom grabs the nearest (by

address) Sub by its bus, shakes it silly, and

applies the logical equivalent of nipple-clips.

serviette a server with less than 300 meg of hard disk

space.

drooler printing is controlled by the drooler daemon,

who dribbles text out of the assigned printer

ports when it feels like it. if the drooling

process is going too slow for your liking, it

can be prompted by invoking any of the currently

running caenobytes.

Booting one does not re-BOOT a Penix system; it is

`re-shoed'. If you boot a Penix system, it will

fall apart. Reshoe-ing involves locating the

sock partition, socking it, then looking about

for something that resembles a shoe-block (a

disk-block with startup information on it). once

located, the shoe-block is overlaid onto the

sock partition and is `laced'. At the request of

our user, we have incorporated dual shoe

partitions, to enable disk mirroring. the System

must always be re-shoed from the same partition;

if you get the left-shoe and the right-shoe

partition mixed up, then after re-shoeing, the

system will take a few tottering steps and will

then fall over.

scanning the sock partition for a shoe block can be a time-consuming

process; if the entire hard disk had to be examined, it could take

days. an algorithm has been implemented that scans disk blocks at

random, on the assumption that there will be more than one shoe

block on the disk (this is a standard security feature - in fact,

more than half of the disk's b locks are usually allocated as

shoe-blocks, to save time when looking for one to shoe from).

example of console messages on booting

Penix v37.019a ROMrev 76:e_beta (development)

shoe in progress

locating sock partition

scanning SCSI bus *******

scanning st506 devices **

getting desperate

scanning floppy drives **

getting really desperate

scanning tape drive *

sock located on tape drive

scanning SCSI bus again ******

loading SCSI device driver

scanning for shoe block at RANDOM

....................................

....................................

....................................

.................... bingo

left shoe located at cyl:00.head:15.sec:16

loading shoe block

processing ......................................

............. ignoring checksum errror

overlaying sock partition

lacing **** shoe partition LACED, Booting

walnut located, processing ..... done

do you want to inhibit DAEMON processes at this time (default=n)? n

do you want to inhibit AENGEL processes at this time (default=n)? n

do you want to inhibit NYEMPH processes at this time (default=n)? n

do you want to inhibit MAENAD processes at this time (default=n)? n

do you want to inhibit SPRITE processes at this time (default=n)? n

do you want to inhibit CAENOBITE processes at this time (default=y)? y

too bad. you can't.

do you want to inhibit GOELEM processes at this time (default=n)? n

starting Daemons: spon spoo furph wrack wruin hobble

castrate whats_all_this_then drooler

starting Aengels: moroni goliad mikayel cefiar lucifer

starting Nyemphs: dom_net_prep dom_net_enquire TOPY_server

EN_server spk_server clock_DVA_server sK_pup_server

starting Maenads: *** Maenad table is empty

starting Sprites: cursor_flash keyboard_click

annoying_floppy_drive_noise

starting Goelems: lif_dat_wait tote_dat_bail

starting Caenobytes:

*** Caenobyte table is empty

this is a DOM net_device: initialising SpankIO WhipIO

initialising serIOus lines 000 001 002 003...

... and so on.

directories/filesystems

/uselss/little_black_book

network list of all machines in the Clique

/closet

list of filesystem devices, in format:

address device type

00000000 RAM

00000001 RAM

00000010 RAM

00000011 RAM

00000100 RAM

00000101 DEVICE: FLOPPY CONTROLLER...

/passwords

system password file. It has passwords in it.

/now_hear_this_you_scum

system login message.

/spew_bucket

Sysadmin's mail file

/lib

library files here

/libs

other library files here. if a process needs

a library file from here, you can guarrantee

that it's over in /uselss/lib instead.

/der

text files/notices here

/der/zorcho

insult packets

/der/ttbowl/

waste goes in here

/der/greeting_card

`oops' packets

/comp

executeables live here

/whoops_a_daisy

unallocated blocks here

/ho_hum

logfiles here

/trash

schedule tables for backgrounders

/ephemeral

temporary files

/ephemeral/what_the_hell_happened

System command log.

/help_files

the man entries would be here, but our user

thinks that `man' is sexist, so we called it

help_files.

/important/really_important

DO NOT REMOVE OR ALTER THIS FILE!

/mungle

not sure what this directory is for, but the

system won't run without it.

/thingies

utility programs and other stuff we haven't

documented yet.

/typical/who's_where

system task table

/who's_who

a duplicate of the system task table; used by

some programs but not all of them. when in

doubt refer to both task-tables and then

guess.

/keymaps/keymaps/keymaps/keymaps/spo0

Default keymap for wi.

/WinGE/danglements

default files for WinGE graphic images

/.snivel

default WinGE startup-script file

Posted

http://very.net/~nikolai/penix/

hay varias cosillas vacilonas como esta opcion del comnado "Exorcise" :

c Caenobites. Will attempt to distract any currently-running

caenobite processes by creating a BOX process and sending

it a BOX_OPEN packet. This will cause the BOX to open a

temporary file in /usr/leviathan/labyrinth, attracting the

attention of any caenobite processes on the system. Since

there isn't any actual way of terminating a caenobite

process, keeping them busy is the best we can do.

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