UHC Tools

[patrik]

Originally Posted by demolition

WB 3.9 BB2 with custom 3.9 KS and ViNCEd shell.

Apparently we had not tested our addition of mirror support in 3.9. The 3.9 shell behaves differently compared to the 3.1 shell in several ways. I pushed an update to uhcinstall, please give it a try.

[demolition]

Originally Posted by patrik

Apparently we had not tested our addition of mirror support in 3.9. The 3.9 shell behaves differently compared to the 3.1 shell in several ways. I pushed an update to uhcinstall, please give it a try.

Seems like your change did the trick and it is working now.

I have another question - if I try to run 'aminetsearch <something>' I get the message 'driar.se: Connection refused (61)'. Do I need to configure which Aminet mirror I would like to use and how do I do that?
Edit: Running uhcstatus, it says that 'UHCAMINETMIRROR' is set to 'de.aminet.net/aminet/'.

[patrik]

Originally Posted by demolition

Seems like your change did the trick and it is working now.

Great

Originally Posted by demolition

I have another question - if I try to run 'aminetsearch <something>' I get the message 'driar.se: Connection refused (61)'. Do I need to configure which Aminet mirror I would like to use and how do I do that?
Edit: Running uhcstatus, it says that 'UHCAMINETMIRROR' is set to 'de.aminet.net/aminet/'.

For the different searches available, we use our own servers and the main one is driar.se. It is very strange that you get a connection refused as it is up and responds without issues right now. Is there any type of firewalling present?

When the search is working, it does the search and then downloads the file from the configured aminet mirror.

We configured de.aminet.net as default as the main mirror is not very reliable and does not report errors in a usable way. When the main mirror doesn't work it is usually problems with its DB backend and then it still answers HTTP 200 OK, but with an error message in the content. It should answer HTTP 40X so it can easily be detected.

So say you are asking for an lha file, you get back and the lha file will contain "Unable to connect to database" - not really helpful. By now I have sent two emails to the aminet admins about this without an answer back.

[demolition]

Originally Posted by patrik

For the different searches available, we use our own servers and the main one is driar.se. It is very strange that you get a connection refused as it is up and responds without issues right now. Is there any type of firewalling present?

Yes, my firewall generally only allows outgoing traffic on ports 80 and 443 so I checked its log and can see that it rejected a package going towards driar.se port 13532 so that is probably why it is not accessible. Is this the port that is always used to query the db?

[patrik]

Originally Posted by demolition

Yes, my firewall generally only allows outgoing traffic on ports 80 and 443 so I checked its log and can see that it rejected a package going towards driar.se port 13532 so that is probably why it is not accessible. Is this the port that is always used to query the db?

Yes.

[demolition]

After allowing traffic on that port, the search is now working and I was able to download a file from Aminet.

[patrik]

Originally Posted by demolition

After allowing traffic on that port, the search is now working and I was able to download a file from Aminet.

Good work, great to hear! All the other searchers/downloaders should also work then.

Btw, did you see that you can set a different reader for aminetreadme etc (all *readme scripts)? Very useful if you don’t have the possibility of very large shell. I use PPMore as reader on my A2000 for example.

[demolition]

I only tried the aminet search and get functions so far, but I will try to test the other functions as well, including readme and extract.

Since I keep a local Aminet mirror as well, I should also try to see if I can set it up to download from that one.

Btw, I have also been using the Synergy client a bit and it more or less just worked. The only minor issue I have found is that my PC mouse is reporting very rapidly, so when I move a Window in WB it is very slow on the Amiga side since it is updating the GUI for every mouse event. I think my mouse is reporting at 1000 Hz to Windows, but the question is whether the server updates the mouse for every single hardware event or which frequency it uses. I have not found any setting in the server to change this. Apart from this, it is a great tool to have.

[patrik]

Originally Posted by demolition

I only tried the aminet search and get functions so far, but I will try to test the other functions as well, including readme and extract.

There is a complete list of commands, each with a small description on http://driar.se/uhc/. Plus there is also the help command with more detailed help files for most of the commands.

Originally Posted by demolition

Since I keep a local Aminet mirror as well, I should also try to see if I can set it up to download from that one.

Should work fine as long as the directory structure is the same as a normal mirror.

Originally Posted by demolition

Btw, I have also been using the Synergy client a bit and it more or less just worked. The only minor issue I have found is that my PC mouse is reporting very rapidly, so when I move a Window in WB it is very slow on the Amiga side since it is updating the GUI for every mouse event. I think my mouse is reporting at 1000 Hz to Windows, but the question is whether the server updates the mouse for every single hardware event or which frequency it uses. I have not found any setting in the server to change this. Apart from this, it is a great tool to have.

Normally the mouse moves fine with SynergyClient unless the cpu load is high, so I think you are correct. 1000Hz mouse updates through the synergy server will be like a minor DDOS attack of the Amiga . I guess the 1000Hz is for gaming?

One idea to lessen the load from the SynergyClient side would be to not send a new mouse position event to input.device if the position haven't been updated since the previous one. However, it would be much more optimal if the server filtered out such unecessary events already as the client would still have to handle all the unecessary traffic.

If you set LOGLEVEL to 6, you can see if you are receiving mouse events with identical positions. However, in this mode, do not drag a window. When you grab a window, intuition will most likely block all shell output, including the debug output from SynergyClient, effectively stopping it from doing any more processing. In that case, use a real mouse to move the window and free SynergyClient from the block.

[demolition]

Originally Posted by patrik

Normally the mouse moves fine with SynergyClient unless the cpu load is high, so I think you are correct. 1000Hz mouse updates through the synergy server will be like a minor DDOS attack of the Amiga . I guess the 1000Hz is for gaming?

Yes, it is a gaming mouse so it reports at 1 kHz. Quite a bit more than the 50-60 Hz that the Amiga is used to.
Actually the mouse moves fine on the Amiga side as long as I am not dragging a Window.

[patrik]

Originally Posted by demolition

Yes, it is a gaming mouse so it reports at 1 kHz. Quite a bit more than the 50-60 Hz that the Amiga is used to.
Actually the mouse moves fine on the Amiga side as long as I am not dragging a Window.

Are you perhaps using some solid window moving solution? If so I wouldn’t be surprised if it uses a lot of resources, stealing too much cpu time from the TCP/IP stack for it to deliver data to SynergyClient with low enough latency.

SynergyClient is already at priority 20, like input.device, but the TCP/IP stack will usually be at 0 and is thus sensitive to resource hoggers.

You could try increasing the priority of the TCP/IP stack and see if it helps.

[demolition]

Originally Posted by patrik

Are you perhaps using some solid window moving solution?

No, it is just using the regular outline-rectangle so shouldn't be that tough for the system to handle. It is regular AGA though so no RTG.

I tried a few of the other tools including readme and extract and they seemed to work fine. I also tried changing the Aminet mirror to my own mirror and that meant that the download speed went from 150 kb/s to 300 kb/s. Not sure why the DE mirror did not go faster, but 2x is quite a boost.

What are you using as the index for your search? The INDEX file from one of the official mirrors or are you somehow building your own index?

[jayminer]

I've had the same issue on my vampirized A500 with SynergyClient and some sluggishness when dragging windows, even on RTG-screens and with just the outline of the window showing. It got a bit better when I played around with changing priorities using Scout (or was it executive?) but still not great.

I also have a gaming mouse and hadn't even been thinking about that it might spam updates. Gonna try with a cheap USB-Mouse that probably only has a fifth of the refresh rate to see if it makes any difference!

We build our own aminet index using the INDEX-file and reformat them a bit, we tried to make them as compact as possible to avoid line-wrapping on a full width shell even on chipset-screens. It can still line-wrap on some searches with a standard screen and Topaz but with just a little more compact font (like XEN) or a little higher resolution we mostly get everything on one line!

[jayminer]

I did a few tests on my A500 and if I set my mouse to 125Hz I never get any "lag" when dragging Windows around but if I leave it at 1000Hz it feels like it runs at half-speed or something. So it's definitely a problem of the Amiga getting spammed with messages from the Synergy Server.

[jayminer]

Hi everyone, we have continued working and adding stuff to this and fixing and optimizing things.

Some of the things that have been added in the last year are:
- Now handles mirrors for the searches, so if one of our servers are down it will fall back on the other.
- Added more search-indexers, it's now possible to search and download from amigascne, modland and the fred fish archive (disks 1-1000).
- The entire search-engine has been overhauled, it's now a compiled program instead of scripts for added speed and stability, and also allows prettier and more compact output in some cases.
- A couple new commands and scripts have been added to make life in the shell more convenient, we have ForEachLine to allow looping through lines in a textfile, and also some scripts that makes traversing directories in scripts a little easier (popd and pushd).
- There's also a very simple package manager (more like package installer) called pkg added which can install a few utilities easily directly from the shell, for example "pkg install amigae" will download and extract AmigaE from aminet and set up paths.
- Lots more have been fixed and optimized

So if you have any interest in this, please try it out! If you have an older version already, remember to update everything by running uhcupdate.

One more thing, if you installed this in the early days it is recommended to change the UHC-lines in S:User-Startup to:

;BEGIN UHC
 IF EXISTS "${UHCBIN}UHC-Startup"
   Execute "${UHCBIN}UHC-Startup"
 ENDIF
;END UHC

[kolla]

Would it be possible to add support for $http_proxy to aget?

[patrik]

Originally Posted by kolla

Would it be possible to add support for $http_proxy to aget?

Yes.

We actually talked about adding it recently :P.

I see that you have a synergy client component to the UHC tools package. I'm curious if you ever intend to implement a synergy server? Or do you know of a synergy server that is available. Would this be a simple effort to implement?

Specifically I'm looking for one that works on OS3.x. I would like to use my A3000 keyboard and mouse to control another linux system. I got twinVNC to 'work' but it required the full screen updates from the linux system, I only want keyboard and mouse.

Thanks

[patrik]

As far as I know, the only "Amiga" synergy server is the one bundled with MorphOS.

I have thought about it, and I think it would be very cool, but it is not trivial and I havent had any use/motivation for it myself - the other way around is usually more convenient and reliable as you can have a main computer running server with keyboard and mouse always on and turn on/off secondary computers as you feel.

[patrik]

Originally Posted by kolla

Would it be possible to add support for $http_proxy to aget?

Please give http://megaburken.net/~patrik/pt/aget a go.

Be aware that it does not support the no_proxy variable, if you need that.