Thanks to the efforts of one of our readers at Boston University,
sun-managers now has a list of Frequent Asked Questions (FAQ). And,
yes, the answers are included as well!
To keep the maintenance of this list centralized, there is a new
address at our site specifically for the FAQ maintainer. Please send
corrections and submissions to that address (mentioned below). Please
DO NOT send FAQ corrections and additions to me or to the main list.
Note that this message has a "Reply-To" in the header which will direct
all replies to the FAQ address!
Share and enjoy!
William LeFebvre
--------------------
Sun-Managers' Frequently Asked Questions
Last update 1-6-91
This is collection of common questions posted to the sun-managers
mailing list. This will hopefully reduce traffic to the list and
become a useful resource by itself.
Keeping with the style of a similar FAQ for comp.windows.x, questions
marked with a '+' indicate questions new to this issue; those with
significant changes of content since the last issue are marked by '*'
Please send corrections or submissions to "sun-managers-faq@eecs.nwu.edu".
Questions
1) How to use the sun-managers mailing list?
2) How do I join or remove myself from the mailing list?
3) How do I find out what patches are available from Sun?
4) What is "anonymous ftp" and how do I use it?
5) How do I find anonymous ftp sites?
6) How do I set up NIS/YP to use DNS?
7) How do I use DNS instead of NIS for hostname resolution?
8) Can I run both OpenWindows and MIT X11R4?
9) What is the format.dat entry for drive X?
10) What does "NFS write error X" mean?
11) Can I use a disk greater than 700meg?
12) What does the "nres_gethostbyaddr !=" error mean?
13) How do I move disks from xy451 to xy753/7053 disk controllers?
14) How come yppasswdd does not automatically update the yp maps?
15) What does NFS getattr failed/RPC: Authentication error mean?
Answers
1. How to use the sun-managers mailing list
Read the "policy" article from the list moderator that is
posted on the first and the 16th of every month.
2) How do I join or remove myself from the mailing list?
see above.
3) How do I find out what patches are available from Sun?
You can call the Sun patch database system at 1-800-477-4768,
login as "guest". You can search for patches and have them
mailed to you.
Many anonymous ftp sites have partial collections of patches.
4) What is "anonymous ftp" and how do I use it?
Anonymous ftp is a way to provide restricted access to a host
for the Internet community at large. You typically use ftp
to connect to a host and enter "anonymous" (possibly "ftp" or
"guest") for the user name and your "real" user name for the
password. Do not type your real password at any time, as it
is common to log all anonymous transactions and your password
would be visible on the remote system.
When transferring files, make sure you have "binary" or "image"
mode set for transferring binary (non-ascii) files. This
is true in the most common cases, such as compressed files or
tar archives. In some few cases, you might need "tenex" mode.
Read the manual page for 'ftp'.
5) How do I find anonymous ftp sites?
There are a number of well known ftp sites, such as
"ftp.uu.net" and "gatekeeper.dec.com", you usually found out
about these from newsgroups, mailing lists or word of mouth.
Now there is a program that allows you to search for programs
and tells you what ftp sites they are available from.
Log into "quiche.cs.mcgill.ca" with the user name of "archie".
It will give you directions from that point.
6) How do I set up NIS/YP to use DNS?
Under SunOS 4.1 and 4.1.1, there is a "#B=" at the top of
/var/yp/Makefile, uncommment and change this to "B=-b" and
setup NIS in the usual fashion. Under 4.0.x, edit the
Makefile or apply the following "diff":
*** Makefile Fri Jun 29 15:49:02 1990
--- Makefile-orig Sat Apr 9 04:57:45 1988
***************
*** 62,64 ****
| awk '{for (i = 2; i <= NF; i++) print $$i, $$0}' \
! | $(MAKEDBM) -b - $(YPDBDIR)/$(DOM)/hosts.byname; \
$(STDHOSTS) $(DIR)/hosts | \
--- 62,64 ----
| awk '{for (i = 2; i <= NF; i++) print $$i, $$0}' \
! | $(MAKEDBM) - $(YPDBDIR)/$(DOM)/hosts.byname; \
$(STDHOSTS) $(DIR)/hosts | \
***************
*** 65,67 ****
awk 'BEGIN { OFS="\t"; } $$1 !~ /^#/ { print $$1, $$0 }' \
! | $(MAKEDBM) -b - $(YPDBDIR)/$(DOM)/hosts.byaddr; \
touch hosts.time; \
--- 65,67 ----
awk 'BEGIN { OFS="\t"; } $$1 !~ /^#/ { print $$1, $$0 }' \
! | $(MAKEDBM) - $(YPDBDIR)/$(DOM)/hosts.byaddr; \
touch hosts.time; \
7) How do I use DNS instead of NIS for hostname resolution?
The "normal" behavior of a hostname lookup under NIS is to
consult the NIS hosts map and then DNS (if configured).
You can change this so all hostname lookups go directly to
DNS. The SunOS shared library mechanism allows you change
the behavior of any command that is dynamically linked to
the shared library. In SunOS 4.1 and greater releases, there
is an optional package called "shlib custom" that contains a
"kit" for rebuilding shared libraries. You can select this
in suninstall or load after. It will put the files in
/usr/lib/shlib.etc. Note that machines that come with pre-installed
SunOS don't include this. It contains both a "normal" and System V
version of libc and some tools to build shared libraries. The
Sun-supplied README file gives some help, but doesn't detail how to
change the hostname lookup functions. The most complete procedure
for this that I have come by is on titan.rice.edu, called
"bindon41.shar" - it goes one step further and replaces the
Sun resolver routines with BIND 4.8.3 versions.
Note that you can still use NIS for other things in environment,
such as passwd, group info, etc - the NIS hosts map is just ignored.
There are several important statically linked binaries that will
break if you replace the Sun routines. "/etc/mount" is probabably
where you will first notice that it doesn't know about any hosts
that is not present in /etc/hosts. My solution was to compile
mount with the new resolver routines, but you need source to do
this. You might just have to have all hosts (and aliases) in
/etc/hosts that you want to mount or use Internet addresses (yuck).
Another "feature" of a DNS-only environment is that hostnames
will sometimes be returned all in uppercase, this will not match
the lower-case entries you typically have in /etc/exports,
/etc/bootparams, etc.
8) Can I run both OpenWindows and MIT X11R4?
The shared libraries for OpenWindows have higher version
numbers than the MIT versions, MIT executables will try to use
the OpenWindows libraries and OpenWindows executables will
complains about version mismatches. You can toggle between
the 2 environments by setting your $path and LD_LIBRARY_PATH
variables. Assuming you installed the MIT libraries in
/usr/lib and the OpenWindows libraries are in
/usr/openwin/lib, set the following before you start the
windowing system:
MIT X11R4 environment
set path = (/usr/bin/X11 $path)
setenv LD_LIBRARY_PATH /usr/lib
Sun OpenWindows
set path = (/usr/openwin/bin /usr/openwin/demo $path)
setenv LD_LIBRARY_PATH /usr/openwin/lib
The OpenWindows server has a display PostScript ability that
serveral of OpenWidows applications require to run. These
clients will not run under the MIT server. You can get a
limited PostScript preview capability under either server with
GNU Ghostscript, a public domain package available from
various ftp sites (try prep.ai.mit.edu first)
9) What is the format.dat entry for drive X?
This is a tough one. The answer can vary according to what OS
you are running, the architecture of your machine or the type
of SCSI/SMD/IPI controller you are using. Opinions also vary
on how to format once you have all the information you need.
If you are buying a Sun supported drive, you will likely find
an entry for it in "/etc/format.dat". On third party drives,
you should inquire with the vendor you bought it from. If you
are on your own, try to get hold of the manufacturer's OEM
manual for your drive model. You might be able to derive
enough information from the manual to make up your own entry.
Some drives has numerous jumper and dip switch settings and
may be described in terms you are not familiar with. You are
probably better off posting to a list (such as sun-managers)
for help. Some drive manufacturers run "bulletin boards" with
drive information on them. The ones I've seen are biased towards
PC drives, but most of the information is still relevant.
Fujitsu America BBS 408 944 9899
Seagate Tech BBS 408 438-8771
10) What does "NFS write error X" mean?
You can lookup the error codes in /usr/include/sys/errno.h.
Two common ones are 13, which is "permission denied" and 70
"stale file handle". 13 is probably coming from an
incorrect /etc/exports entry. 70 will occur when a fileserver
goes down for some reason. You can usually get rid of the
error by unmounting and remounting the filesystem in question.
Under SunOS 4.1, you can run "showfhd" to translate the NFS
"file handle" given in the error message into a Unix pathname.
Beware that showfhd does a "find" on your server to get the
filename.
11) Can I use a disk greater than 700meg?
Sun doesn't currently sell SCSI disks over 700meg. A problem
with the current Sun disk driver is that it uses SCSI group 0
commands. This command set only has 21 bits of storage for the
block number. This means you can have 2^21 or 2097152 as the
largest block number understood by the SCSI driver. The fix is
to use SCSI group 1 commands, where you have 31 bits for block
numbers. There is rumored to be a new sd.o coming to do this.
You can use the recent crop of 1.2 gigabyte drives with the current
driver, but you "waste" several megabytes (i.e. no big deal).
The Fujitsu M2266SA, CDC/Imprimis/Seagate Wren 7, HP 97549T and
Micropolis 1598 are known to work. These should all be around
$3k or under and most have 5 year warranties.
12) What does the "nres_gethostbyaddr !=" error mean?
This message is from "ypserv" and has been determined to be
"harmless". Sun supplies a patch (#1039839) to quiet it, but
the patched version appears to die silently at random times, so
it might be wiser to just ignore it.
13) How do I move disks from xy451 to xy753/7053 disk controllers?
You have to reformat the drives for them to be recognized by
the new controller. Save the bad block list on drives while
they are still on the old controller and load this back on
the disk when you are formatting the disk on the new
controller. The "dump" command in "defect" menu of "format"
will write out a defect list to a file, the "load" command
in the same menu will read the defect list from a file.
14) How come yppasswdd does not automatically update the yp maps?
There is a bug in 4.1 rpc.yppasswdd that causes it misinterpret
the command line arguments. A work-around is to add the
"-nosingle" flag (which is the default), this shifts the
arguments over one, so "passwd" is read instead of "-m".
For example:
rpc.yppasswdd /var/yp/passwd -nosingle -m passwd DIR=/var/yp
15) What does NFS getattr failed/RPC: Authentication error mean?
You are probably running a pre-4.0 version of NFS and your
username is in more than 8 groups. There was is limit on the
number of groups that could be represented in the rpc service
(called NGRPS). On pre-4.0 systems this was 8, now it is 16.
Since many vendors other than Sun are still running old versions
of NFS, you might see this error even if your SunOS is recent.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:06:15 CDT