egdorf%zaphod@lanl.gov (Skip Egdorf at Los Alamos National Laboratory) (03/10/89)
> I have a need to develop a yppasswd interface for a non-SUN machine > (specifically, a LISP Machine), ... > > Or is there an easier way to do all this? There is indeed a better way to do this on a Lisp machine. A company called International Lisp associates has developed an RPC/NFS for the Symbolics from the public specs. I have been using this for some time now, and it works very well. I believe that Symbolics has picked this up from ILA and is now supporting it on Genera 7.2. See your Lisp machine vendor for details. I am not sure if yppasswd itself is supported, but the RPC code is all in place and user accessable (with a nice 'defrpc' macro that does much of what the rpcgen compiler does in a lisp'ish sort of way) with hooks to YP for things like user names. Even if yppasswd is not supported, the underlying structure gives you a whale of a start. Two war stories: I added an IBM PC with PC/NFS to the ethernet, mounted 'Symbolics:>' as D: and ran the output of a knowledge-based application through Microsoft Chart for a PC-user. Those who had been trying to string a serial line and chant arcane gibberish at both machines to get the files copied were... well, pleased at the speed with which it worked. (was there supposed to be a Sun there somewhere???) Some of our 3650 users report Better performance from NFS mounted filesystems than from local disks. Good luck on the yppasswd quest. Let us (the net) know how you do. Skip Egdorf hwe@lanl.gov