drone and windows NT. Any success stories?

[Paul E Johnson]

I work with people who use windows and windows NT and I said they have
to use Drone, but it is turned into a nightmare.  I've checked our
friends in Michigan and they disavow any knowledge of winNT, and I don't
blame them. But there maybe somebody here who has tried it...

Questions in no particular order:

1. There is a problem about execute permissions because NT doesn't work
like unix.  Basically, windows NT ignores anything I do with permissions
inside the bash shell.  In order to get the file "drone" (an expect
script) to execute, I have to rename it drone.exe.

But a guy I'm working with in Indiana claims he has an NT system that
will execute things called "drone" , no .exe required.  How do you
figure that?

2. After renaming it "drone.exe", when I try to execute it, I get the
error that  "program too big to fit in memory". What do you think?  I've
been reading the internet/usenet on this for a couple of hours and many
people have found viruses that cause that output, but I scanned and dont
find them.  One message claimed I've found binary incompatbility between
versions of things compiled with visual c++ (which is used to compile
the Expect program for
winNT).(http://pcl.cs.ucla.edu/projects/parsec/bulletin/78.htm)

3. I have expect installed in /usr/local.  I have other stuff there too,
which I compiled from the days when we Swarm-ites ran the CygWin32
environment, rather than the Swarm-2.1 setup.  When the swarm terminal
starts up, it uses .bash_login and it erases my path and replaces it
with /Swarm-2.1.1/bin.  What's up with that?

4. Now I have no idea how the guy in indiana gets drone to run, but
after one run it crashes because it can't read from /dev/null.

He says the error message is 

DoLocalCmd: couldn't read file "/dev/null": no such file or directory

I've read the Cygnus documentation, which has improved massively since
we started using cygnus in swarm about 2 years ago. Anyway, they explain
that you get /dev/null for free in a cygnus shell and it seems this is
indeed true, it behaves like it ought to when you pipe stdout to it, for
example.  But drone does not see it.

I'm just about ready to throw in the towel on this, but I'd like to know
what's going wrong.


-- 
Paul E. Johnson                       email: address@hidden
Dept. of Political Science            http://lark.cc.ukans.edu/~pauljohn
University of Kansas                  Office: (785) 864-9086
Lawrence, Kansas 66045                FAX: (785) 864-5700

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