SUMMARY: No NIS, No DNS!

From: erin o'neill (erin@factory.net)
Date: Thu Feb 22 1996 - 12:02:55 CST


Thanks to the following:
From: lynn.walker@amp.com (Lynn Walker)
From: Bill Reed <reedwv@stp.xfi.bp.com>
From: Justin Young <justiny@cluster.engr.subr.edu>
From: Petros Michalis <michalis@dpg.rnb.com>
From: Ric Anderson <ric@rtd.com>
From: pasken@thunder.slu.edu (Robert Pasken)
From: Kamal Kantawala <kamal@clio.rad.sunysb.edu>
From: stern@sunrise.East.Sun.COM (Hal Stern - Distinguished Systems Engineer)

I definately did NOT give enough info as everyone pointed me to the
/etc/nsswitch.conf file, which was set up correctly. What I forgot to
mention was that telnet & ftp were working & then stopped. sendmail may
have never been working properly.

I felt the telnet/ftp problem was a bigger problem (esp since I had a
sendmail.cf file that worked on another sun). Hal Stern was quite patient
with me & pointed me to the /etc/hosts file. Which I must admit I looked
at first, but because I am new I didn't notice that a couple of IP numbers
were wrong. Hal asked me to carefully look at that file. I did when I
compared it to my doc on all the IP numbers I noticed that 2 were very
wrong. I changed those & viola telnet & ftp worked ! Then I ftp'd the
sendmail.cf file that worked & the whole thing is sorta working.

I'm getting some showmount errors & Hal has given me some things to try.
The sendmail.cf needs some fine tuning.

Thanks for all your help!!
erin

My question & the responses follow:

More info:
The machine can NOT ping out - nor telnet out. Yet I can telnet in &
ping in.

So I decided to reboot, as that's worked wonders in the past on the
4.1.3_u1 machine I used to work on. I figured it couldn't hurt & it
might tell me more stuff (btw this machine is a ver. 5.4)

As it went thru shutting down I got the following message:
  showmount: machine.name RPC program not registered.

It then asks me if I want to continue - I say yes & reboot. As it came
up I saw that rpcbind, keyserv kerbd were done.

Ok OK I haven't finished my double latte & all but something is really
wrong here!! Any suggestions? Anyone know how to read rpcinfo output?

HELP!

thanks all!
erin

Erin O'Neill
Interactive Services Group

Check the order of the hosts entry in your /etc/nsswitch.conf file.
-------------
 
> I am having trouble telneting out of this machine.
> Because of that I'm not sure if my sendmail is set
> up correctly???
>
> The /etc/resolv.conf file has been set up correctly.
This ^^^^^^^^^^ file is for DNS not mail.
 Heard of /etc/sendmail.cf ? look in there for mailhost.

-- 

Erin, did you enable DNS in your /etc/nsswitch.conf? Also, what about your sendmail.cf.

if you're running 2.4, and want to use /etc/hosts (then maybe DNS), make sure your /etc/nsswitch.conf file reads:

hosts: files dns

what that means is that you (at one time) were acting as an NFS server to machine.name, and it still has a line in your /etc/rmtab file (a list of remote machines that have filesystems mounted from you). showmount is trying to talk to it, but can't find the RPC program it's looking for (locally or remotely, might be trying to talk to mountd). don't worry about it; if you know you're no longer an NFS server try # cat /dev/null > /etc/rmtab

and reboot.

------ ok, it's trying to talk to its own mountd daemon, which probably isn't running.

has this machine changed ip address? or changed name? do /etc/hosts, NIS/DNS give you the same answer for the host's IP address?

----- On Wed, 14 Feb 1996, erin o'neill wrote:

> > I recently started at a new company that has predominately SGIs. > An SGI is the mail host. Their is a sparc20 running sunos 2.4 > that needs to send mail to this mailhost. The mailhost is in > the /etc/hosts file.

Have you considered running a small DNS or even NIS server?

> > I am having trouble telneting out of this machine. > Because of that I'm not sure if my sendmail is set > up correctly??? >

1. Can you telnet to the SGI by its name? 2. Can you telnet to it by its IP address?

If (1) is no, make an entry in the Sun's /etc/hosts file for it. if (2) is no as well, you have a routing problem, check your routes, especially your default route and whether the SGI and the Sun are on the same subnet.

Once you've got your routes up and running, try getting the sendmail package from ftp.x.org for the only reason that it has example sendmail.cf's for the most common configurations. It would take forever to debug sendmail over email!

----- Check /etc/nsswitch.conf. The "hosts:" line determines how hostnames are looked up. The choices are files (use /etc/hosts), dns (use DNS via /etc/resolv.conf), NIS and NIS+.

You need hosts: files as a minimu, so the machien can figure out its IP number from the name in /etc/hostname.le0 at boot time. You can also have hosts: files dns to look in dns after /etc/hosts. That's what I use on most systems.

----- Modify "/etc/nsswitch.conf" to allow using files and dns to do address resolution. This topic is covered in detail in many places ------

if you're getting showmount errors, it could be that the machine has changed IP addresses from the time it booted until the time name services started -- that is NIS/DNS and /etc/hosts don't agree.

try this: put the machine's name/IP address in /etc/hosts, and nothing else. set up /etc/resolv.conf with the IP addres o f your name server (not its name). if you're running solaris 2.x, make sure /etc/nsswitch.conf has hosts: files dns in it, and away you go ------ Look into the /etc/nsswitch.conf file. For Solaris to resolve names using just the hosts file, you have to make the entry for hosts in this file to files.

Something like:

hosts: files

instead of:

hosts: nis [NOTFOUND=return] files



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