cks@hawkwind.utcs.toronto.edu (Chris Siebenmann) (04/18/91)
So, I decided that instead of hulking the SCSI tape drive around to two remote sites to load RISC Fortran 2.0, I should investigate doing a remote installation from the tape's current location, my office workstation. Setld has an option for installing from a remote host, but it uses RIS instead of rmt or rsh + dd or something nice. Win some, loose some. So I set up RIS on my office workstation and started fiddling. Loss 1: RIS insists you can only register machines in the same domain as your host. This is silly, since RIS can be used by anyone who can reach your machine via TCP/IP; getting around this requires installing bogus /etc/hosts names, installing the machines, and then fixing ~ris/.rhosts. And why does RIS insist on knowing the Ethernet addresses all the time? I'm never going to try booting these machines via RIS, so I could care less; I made up bogus Ethernet addresses for them. Loss 2: A RIS-based setld load seems to loose dependancy information; the remote install tried to install, in order, the Fortran manpages, the Fortran programming environment, the F77 unsuported utilities, and the V2.0 (Fortran) backend. The middle two depend on the last one, and refused to install; I had to rerun setld afterwards and tell it to install those two again. When I installed it on my workstation from a local tape drive, setld got it right. -- "NFS should be viewed as a superior replacement for FTP, not as a real network-wide Unix filesystem." - Henry Spencer cks@hawkwind.utcs.toronto.edu ...!{utgpu,utzoo,watmath}!utgpu!cks
archerb@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu (04/18/91)
Does anyone know why Ultrix won't allow remote access to tape drives other than rdump, etc? We have a dept. in a real bind, since they don't have the disk space available to use ris and moving the tape drive requires shutting down the system - t a cost to researchers running long jobs. A related question. Can one install from an NFS mounted CD ROM, without having to go through ris? Barry Archer, UMKC Network Whosit archerb@gawain.umkc.edu ! Ultrix archerb@vax1.umkc.edu ! VMS archerb@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu ! guest
marchany@vtserf.cc.vt.edu (Randy Marchany) (04/18/91)
In article <1991Apr17.212012.11522@jarvis.csri.toronto.edu> cks@hawkwind.utcs.toronto.edu (Chris Siebenmann) writes: > Loss 1: RIS insists you can only register machines in the same domain >as your host. This is silly, since RIS can be used by anyone who can >reach your machine via TCP/IP; getting around this requires installing >bogus /etc/hosts names, installing the machines, and then fixing >~ris/.rhosts. And why does RIS insist on knowing the Ethernet >addresses all the time? I'm never going to try booting these machines >via RIS, so I could care less; I made up bogus Ethernet addresses for >them. > While RIS does insist that the machines are in the same domain, the easy workaround is to enter an unqualified host name and then edit the .rhosts file and add a line with the fully qualified host name. For example, the host I want to add is foo.cs.vt.edu. I enter "foo" at the RIS prompt, select the subsets etc. and exit RIS. I then edit .rhosts and search for the line "foo root". I add a line "foo.cs.vt.edu root". We have used RIS to download subsets to machines in different domains for a number of years with no problems. -Randy Marchany VA Tech Computing Center Blacksburg, VA 24060 INTERNET: marchany@vtserf.cc.vt.edu