BKEHOE@WIDENER.BITNET (05/07/90)
I was just appointed Widener's "official" Sun systems manager, so now I
can finally ask a bunch of questions, since it's my responsibility to make
the fixes! Here we go...hold on tight, folks. Please restrict any
flames/insults/guffaws to mail.
1. Yellow Pages. We've got one SS1 as the YP master, and another as its
slave. To add an acct across the network, I do this:
A. First, add the acct normally to /etc/passwd on the master.
B. Now I go into /var/yp, rm passwd.time, and make passwd .. this will
push the maps out containing the new acct.
So far I've had no problems with this part of it. It's when the user wants
to change their password that I get in trouble. I've got yppasswdd up with
the manual-suggested option of having it look at /var/yp/passwd for the
entries, to keep it from screwing with the master's files. But whenever
they do yppasswd, the change isn't ported properly. Could someone give me
the cut & dry way to properly set up YP so that it'll do everything it
*should*? The closest in TFM I could find was about using ypxfr to push
out changes in the maps -- but I didn't see it pushing out the passwd
changes at all.
2. Idle users. I'm sure there's something out there -- I need to watch for
users that're idle for more than, say, an hour, and give 'em a couple of
warnings before kicking them off (e.g. a problem with sunview left a user
on ttyp4 for 3 days -- [just discovered this a little while ago]).
3. selection-svc. This process is periodically left after a person leaves
sunview. It absolutely refuses to die properly & has to be manhandled. Any
ideas? (This is just the beginning of my bitching about sunview..)
4. SunView. Where to start? We have a server up (SS1) with a diskless
client. When anyone tries to use sunview on the client, it screams
"Watchdog reset!" at some point during sunview's initialization & the
system has to be rebooted. Another error, "panic: Data fault" was solved
via a patch tape from Sun. When they were asked about this, they said that
it may even be a hardware problem (gee, can't read that in the manual can
ya), but left it at that. Any- one have any practical experience with
this? Everything works fine on the client otherwise (as far as using
software goes).
5. hanging. While booting, the client sometimes sits for about 30-40 secs
before kicking in, complaining that the NFS server isn't responding. We
can't find any reason for this. Usually it takes a little activity on the
server to kick the client into premature "birth" (e.g. doing netstat kicks
it in for some reason).
6. logins. Is there a way to have a system-wide login file executed, in
which I could add 'limit coredumpsize=0' to save on drive usage?
7. backups. Anybody have any sure-fire backup methods? My plan is to do a
full backup every month, with incrementals nightly & weekly.
That's about it. If you're pulling out your hair at some (read: all) of my
questions, don't worry - yer in good company! Any help with these things
would be *greatly* appreciated.
-- Brendan Kehoe (bkehoe@widener.bitnet)deckel@relay.nswc.navy.mil (05/08/90)
In response to Brendon Kehoe (bkehoe@widener.bitnet):
1. Yellow Pages:
First of all, whenever you make changes to /etc/passwd all that is
necessary is to "cd /var/yp; make passwd". It is not necessary to remove
passwd.time. It is simply an empty file used to keep track of the last
time that the YP passwd map was remade. When you change the /etc/passwd
file its modification time is later than the modification time on
passwd.time, therefore, the "make" will know that the passwd file has
changed and it will remake it.
Also, "yppasswdd" shold be brought up on the master using the actual file
that you use to add new users. You specified that you add new accounts to
/etc/passwd; that's how we do it. We have yppasswdd started from rc.local
like:
/usr/etc/yppasswdd /etc/passwd -m passwd
and everything works just fine. I tried to do the same thing you did with
/var/yp/passwd but I didn't even have that file so I could never get
yppasswdd started. Someone here told me that the manual references
/var/yp/passwd as an example if you plan to separate your accounts into
local users and YP users. Users that you just want to use your local
system are added to /etc/passwd and users that you want to be under YP so
they can logon to other machines in the YP domain are added to
/var/yp/passwd. If you do this then yppasswdd is started up using
/var/yp/passwd but, when you add new users, you have to add them to that
file.
Debbie Eckel
Naval Surface Warfare Center
deckel@relay.nswc.navy.mil