[daip] 31DEC01 install minor questions

[Michel Fich]

Hi, I just installed 31DEC01 AIPS (on Monday and Tuesday) on my
SUN 220R (2 processor, 2 GByte memory, 220 GB disk) Solaris 8.

Your new install procedure works very well!  I was quite pleased at how
much easier it was then the previous versions.  I might add though that
I did the install twice - after the first time I realized that I had 
made some mistakes and I wiped the entire thing out and started again.

The second time was much better - the mistakes the first time were that
I hadn't read carefully enough, or understood well enough what
I was to do.  I will put together a list of a few clarifications you
might add to the online documentation to help others in the future.

I do have a problem, and I believe I know the solution, but thought
I might check with you before implementing it.

I got the error
Shared memory id failure: Invalid Argument

and I see the correction suggested:  add 4 lines to /etc/system
(I might add in here if I was you: one needs to reboot to get these
set in the kernel).   

so my questions are all to do with these 4 lines
1) set shmsys:shminfo_shmmax=8388608   is this value large enough?
   the old 15OCT98 install manual suggests 10485760 
2) set priority_paging=1    Is there a default value in Solaris 8 that 
   is good (see Bruce's comment below)?                                                           
3) what about the values of ufs_HW/ufs_LW in the last two lines?  Are
   they the optimum values for this system?  Are they necessary?

we don't have a system manager, but get some advice from (Bruce) across
campus. Bruce looked at this issue this morning and said:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
We use the set shmsys:shminfo_shmmax={value} on our ORACLE machines....this
is a "shared memmory value and also
           set priority_paging=1 on memory intensive machines...I believe
it prevents OS from eating up all of memory for I/O cache and such. I also
think that this may not pertain to Solaris8 (default).      

Never used these
        set ufs:ufs_HW=6291456
        set ufs:ufs_LW=4194304
 
Sound like some high/low limits on filesystem. Did the AIPS docs indicate
why these are needed?
 
I used adb to check current settings and verify that these variables are
valid.....
 
# adb -k /dev/ksyms /dev/mem physmem 3e60f
 
shminfo_shmmax/D
        shminfo_shmmax:
        shminfo_shmmax: 0 
ufs_HW/D
        ufs_HW:
        ufs_HW:  393216 
ufs_LW/D
        ufs_LW:
        ufs_LW:  262144 
priority_paging/D
        priority_paging:
        priority_paging:  0
$q                                    
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

thanks for any hints you might be able to give me!

mike fich