[comp.unix.ultrix] Ultrix 4.0 RIS looses

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