[comp.sys.ibm.pc.rt] A funny thing happened on the way to ypserv...

lkw@solaria.csun.edu (Larry Wake) (05/09/89)

In my further adventures in trying to incorporate our 4.3-type RTs into
our existing UNIX environment, I decided it would be a nifty thing to
make one of them into a slave server for our Yellow Pages domain,
especially as I was about to bring down the master for a few minutes,
and wanted to keep the other systems from hanging while he was out.

Went through the usual procedures, as outlined in "System
Administration for the Sun Workstation," which the IBM documentation
kindly points you to (!) -- no problem.  That is, no problem beyond the
usual discovery of yet another program that needed to be recompiled to
recognize the Yellow Pages (ypxfr, in this case; kind of ironic).

Brought down the YP master, and as expected, a couple of clients defect
to the slave -- unexpectedly, though, these clients start to misbehave
in bizarre ways.  Just for fun, I type "ypwhich -m" on one such client,
and discover that the RT is only offering 8 maps -- the Sun that acts
as master offers 19.  Further investigation shows that sure enough,
ypinit on the RT has the Sun set of 19 maps commented out, replaced by
the subset of 8.  Why?  Who knows?  Maybe they just didn't want to see
me go home early tonight.

Anyway, just a word of warning to anyone else who ever might want to do
such a thing.  Uncommenting the first list of 19 maps and commenting
the second list of 8 seems to work just fine -- the RT doesn't seem to
care that it's offering more maps than it actually (apparently) uses,
the other machines on the net get the maps they need, and everyone
lives happily ever after, until next we meet with System Improvements
Made For No Apparent Reason.
-- 
Larry Wake, CSUN Computer Center		lkw@csun.edu
Northridge, CA 91330         			csun!lkw
"And every one of them words rang true..." -- R. Zimmerman