Author Topic: Re-organizaing OS/2-eCS Directories.  (Read 66364 times)

Martin Iturbide

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Re-organizaing OS/2-eCS Directories.
« on: July 21, 2014, 04:44:51 am »
Hi

I still dream of a next version of eCS (or anything else) that improves the directories structure to have a more clean C:\ root. Some years ago I wrote some suggestions like this one (Recommendation #8 – Directory and File Structure ).

I want to know how hard will be to move some folder from the standard structure. I still dream of moving:
- DMISL
- IBMCOM
- IBMGSK
- IBMGSK40
- IBMGSK50
- IBMLAN
- LANGUAGE
- MMOS2
- MPTN
- MUGLIB
- PSFONTS
- TCPIP

Possible a good site for those folder can be under "/OS2/System".

What do you think.? Do you have any experience moving those directories? Which ones can be moved easily and which one of those are hardcoded and can not be place somewhere else?

Regards
Martin Iturbide
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Dave Yeo

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Re: Re-organizaing OS/2-eCS Directories.
« Reply #1 on: July 21, 2014, 05:11:37 am »
I'd guess they all could be moved as long as config.sys,  the various INI files and various MPTN and other networking scripts were also updated. See x: /OS2/INI.RC  for an example of how to create OS2.INI.
The real problem is that eCS basically starts out by installing Warp v4.52 with that directory structure and changing it would be another step in the install process that might break.
BTW, I don't even have a C: drive which will screw anyone breaking in thinking its Windows. Even for a Windows install not using C: will make the system much more secure.

Ian Manners

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Re: Re-organizaing OS/2-eCS Directories.
« Reply #2 on: July 21, 2014, 07:20:37 am »
The biggest hurdle is as Dave points out, its based on the Warp base.
Consider also updates which expect certain directories to exist.

Though on my own OS/2 and on the server I don't have a \TCPIP or \MUGLIB directorys, many years ago I simply moved the contents to \MPTN
and also remove all reference to \TCPIP, \MUGLIB in config and other places, or modified required values to look in \MPTN instead.

The \IBMGSK were also long deleted off my builds, SSL lives in \MPTN\BIN, DLL, and ETC.
I cant even remember what \DMISL was for now, I removed that from my boot drive at least a decade ago if not longer.

The directories are separate to \OS2 simply as \OS2 is operating system, the other directories are other packages or subsystems that are not
required for the core OS/2.

LANGUAGE and PSFONTS are the only ones that to me anyway, make more sense to be under \OS2.

\MMOS2, would be a pain to move that as I have so many links etc to packages I've installed under it. It is after all, MultiMedia.

I'm sure different people will have different ideas, and that is one of the great things about OS/2, it is flexible :)
As long as you have an idea of whats happening.
Cheers
Ian B Manners

Roderick Klein

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Re: Re-organizaing OS/2-eCS Directories.
« Reply #3 on: July 21, 2014, 09:08:05 am »
Hi

I still dream of a next version of eCS (or anything else) that improves the directories structure to have a more clean C:\ root. Some years ago I wrote some suggestions like this one (Recommendation #8 – Directory and File Structure ).

I want to know how hard will be to move some folder from the standard structure. I still dream of moving:
- DMISL
- IBMCOM
- IBMGSK
- IBMGSK40
- IBMGSK50
- IBMLAN
- LANGUAGE
- MMOS2
- MPTN
- MUGLIB
- PSFONTS
- TCPIP

Possible a good site for those folder can be under "/OS2/System".

What do you think.? Do you have any experience moving those directories? Which ones can be moved easily and which one of those are hardcoded and can not be place somewhere else?

Regards

I think you asked this question some time ago and from what I remember this was never done in eCS to prevent things from being broken.  Scripts and other programs.
I think this is also one of the last priorities to worry about, the directories in the OS...
And what it could break. About 8 years ago I looked at this and found about 4 to 5 items that would be broken. Most of the stuff does not use fixed paths. But why run the risk.

Again a low priority....

Roderick

Martin Iturbide

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Re: Re-organizaing OS/2-eCS Directories.
« Reply #4 on: July 21, 2014, 06:23:53 pm »
What I want it is not necessary a priority of the rest.  But at least I can try to do it and document what it is getting broken, so in the future it can easy the job of the guys that "really" want to do it.

Nothing can go wrong if we try it on a VM and in a non-production machine.
Martin Iturbide
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Martin Iturbide

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Re: Re-organizaing OS/2-eCS Directories.
« Reply #5 on: July 21, 2014, 06:32:18 pm »
Hi

I started moving the "IBMGSK__" directories to /OS2/System  and fixing the paths on the config.sys.

I really never found out what "IBMGSK" is for.  According to some post from Alex Taylor some time ago they are part of MPTN and has the RSA encryption keys and are only used by IBM HTTP server . Does other programs use them? Apache? any other server software?

Update: Andy Willis told me that "IBMGSK" is also used by "IBM Personal Communication" software.

Regards
« Last Edit: July 21, 2014, 07:04:28 pm by Martin Iturbide »
Martin Iturbide
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Martin Iturbide

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Re: Re-organizaing OS/2-eCS Directories.
« Reply #6 on: July 21, 2014, 06:43:05 pm »
About 8 years ago I looked at this and found about 4 to 5 items that would be broken. Most of the stuff does not use fixed paths. But why run the risk.

Roderick, did you documented this? did you posted somewhere? Please share the link.
« Last Edit: July 21, 2014, 06:44:58 pm by Martin Iturbide »
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Doug Bissett

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Re: Re-organizaing OS/2-eCS Directories.
« Reply #7 on: July 21, 2014, 07:45:40 pm »
Many years ago (before eCS was ever thought of), I played with moving a few things around. The idea, at the time, was to reduce the amount of disk space that was required for multiple boot systems, by sharing some common code. I remember that I was able to move the network stuff to a common disk, and it worked okay, but it became a PITA when it came time to update. I don't think I tried much more, because it was such a problem to try to manage it.

Moving directories to other directories (IBMGS* to the \OS2\SYSTEM directory, for example), really doesn't accomplish anything, even if it does work, so why bother?

In eCS, there is now an option to move the PROGRAMS directory off of the boot drive. I highly recommend doing that (it should never have been placed on the boot drive in the first place). There is also an option, in the WarpIn installer, to put the default directories (TOOLS, and PROGRAMS) onto a different drive, and I have not, yet, seen a problem with using the same directories on multiple boot systems. I have also moved eCUPS to a common drive, with no trouble.

My main objective was to remove stuff from the boot drive, that really doesn't belong there (ie, it is not actually part of OS/2). The exercise is not complete. There are still things on the boot drive, that really shouldn't be there, but the arcihitecture of the system limits what can be done, and most of what is left is not much of a problem. The main advantage is that installing a new version of eCS, is very much simplified. The main disadvantage, is that I need to remember to do WarpIn installs from both boot systems, to keep the WarpIn databases up to date.

ivan

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Re: Re-organizaing OS/2-eCS Directories.
« Reply #8 on: July 21, 2014, 07:51:03 pm »
Martin, I'm sorry but I just don't understand what you are trying to do.

Moving those directories around id not going to save space so why bother?  The standard boot partition we use is less than 1 GB in size and that includes a few things we have added to the standard OS/2 install disk image ( cups, java, snap tools, utility and warpin ). 

For us 'programs' is a different partition as is 'data'.  We chose this because it makes backups very easy and by having images of the various partitions in both their 'first installed' state and 'when something changes' after that.  Restoring after system or disk failure is usually less than 2 hours including replacing failed parts.

What you are trying to do has the appearance of rearranging the deck-chairs on the Titanic - may look nice but is useless in improving the OS.  The examples you give in 'Recommendation #8 – Directory and File Structure', make me wonder if you have ever looked in the 'windows' directory - it is a mess much worse that anything seen on OS/2 and any flavour of Linux isn't much better.  To follow the windows way and dump everything on the boot partition (I know win7 does create a hidden boot partition if you let it) is just asking for trouble, something IBM were careful to try and avoid when they designed OS/2.

My thoughts can be summed up as, 'if it is working then there is no need to fix it'.

Martin Iturbide

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Re: Re-organizaing OS/2-eCS Directories.
« Reply #9 on: July 22, 2014, 12:05:20 am »
It seems that we have different concepts of what "User Experience" means.  While I like having the most basic directory structure on the root drive there are other people that just like to have dozen directories on the root. I disklike FHS like I told on the past, and YUM/RPM just make the root drive worst, so I want to move things a little bit.

"If it is working, don't fix it" works fine for some guys, and it is good policy for a business critical enviroment. But I want to give it a try to move the directories on my test enviroments and document it here. I'm not putting a gun on your heads to also do it or to help me with it, I'm just experimenting.

People have tried this on the past, but they haven't really documented it, where are the problems? which INI files do you have to change to make it work? What directories are unmovable? If you think that it is useless, low priority, waist of time, just move on to the next forum thread, that is not helping me to document this.

Tell me which directories do you think are un-movable and why for example.

Regards.
Martin Iturbide
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Martin Iturbide

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Re: Re-organizaing OS/2-eCS Directories.
« Reply #10 on: July 22, 2014, 12:14:33 am »
Hi Ian.

It seems that "C:\DMISL" was also a no brainer. I moved it to "C:\OS2\SYSTEM\DMISL" and changed the config.sys to "SET DMIPATH=C:\OS2\SYSTEM\DMISL\BIN".... But I'm not sure what it does either. The SLDB.DMI file was recreated again on the next eCS boot on the new directory.

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guzzi

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Re: Re-organizaing OS/2-eCS Directories.
« Reply #11 on: July 22, 2014, 02:07:59 am »
Interesting...
http://www.stardock.com/temp/kwilas/merlin/rootdir.htm
Almost as if Martin wrote it)
DMISL I -think- is an intel interface standard fro network cards. Not sure though.

Dave Yeo

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Re: Re-organizaing OS/2-eCS Directories.
« Reply #12 on: July 22, 2014, 04:26:01 am »
Quote
DMISL I -think- is an intel interface standard fro network cards. Not sure though.

Seems more to do with remote administration, at least my Warp v4 system has remoterr.mif installed under \dmisl\bin\mifs.
A bit of Googling shows https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desktop_Management_Interface which seems to be about this interface, though from IBM rather then MS.

Roderick Klein

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Re: Re-organizaing OS/2-eCS Directories.
« Reply #13 on: July 22, 2014, 08:22:46 am »
What I want it is not necessary a priority of the rest.  But at least I can try to do it and document what it is getting broken, so in the future it can easy the job of the guys that "really" want to do it.

Nothing can go wrong if we try it on a VM and in a non-production machine.

The point is you can not test it really. Its mostly down to dirty coded apps, sciripts that use hard coded paths. Besides depending on how you move this stuff around you might end up making the path/libpath length even longer... Unless you merge directories...

Roderick

Roderick Klein

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Re: Re-organizaing OS/2-eCS Directories.
« Reply #14 on: July 22, 2014, 08:24:48 am »
About 8 years ago I looked at this and found about 4 to 5 items that would be broken. Most of the stuff does not use fixed paths. But why run the risk.

Roderick, did you documented this? did you posted somewhere? Please share the link.

Nope, no documentation...

That was the verdict at the time when we looked into this... And the question is if you want to break stuff yes or no...

Roderick