[comp.sys.sgi] Nameserver side effects

silvert@cs.dal.ca (Bill Silvert) (06/23/91)

I recently posted a query about running a nameserver on a PI, and
several people pointed out correctly that I could solve my problems by
using a fully qualified name in /etc/sys_id, i.e. editing it to read
"biome.bio.ns.ca" instead of just "biome".  This turns out to have an
unfortunate side effect though -- uname now returns the first 8
characters, namely "biome.bi", which confuses all kinds of software.
For example, I can no longer uucp to other systems, since they don't
recognize "biome.bi".

I hacked this by putting in a couple of hostname calls in uudemon.poll,
but this is pretty crude.  I'm wondering whether anything else got
broken in the process.  Anyone know a clean way out of this?  There
seems to be a lot of ambiguity about when a fully qualified name is
needed.  For now I just changed /etc/sys_id back to "biome" and use
/usr/etc/resolv.conf to solve my nameserver problems, but I wonder if
there is any way to use a fully qualified hostname without breaking uucp?
-- 
William Silvert, Habitat Ecology Division, Bedford Inst. of Oceanography
P. O. Box 1006, Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, CANADA B2Y 4A2.  Tel. (902)426-1577
UUCP=..!{uunet|watmath}!dalcs!biome!silvert
BITNET=silvert%biome%dalcs@dalac	InterNet=silvert%biome@cs.dal.ca

arc@kaibab.wpd.sgi.com (Andrew Cherenson) (06/24/91)

In article <1991Jun23.145151.8517@cs.dal.ca> silvert@cs.dal.ca (Bill Silvert) writes:
>using a fully qualified name in /etc/sys_id, i.e. editing it to read
>"biome.bio.ns.ca" instead of just "biome".  This turns out to have an
>unfortunate side effect though -- uname now returns the first 8
>characters, namely "biome.bi", which confuses all kinds of software.
>For example, I can no longer uucp to other systems, since they don't
>recognize "biome.bi".

Fixed in IRIX 4.0: uname strips the domain.

>I hacked this by putting in a couple of hostname calls in uudemon.poll,
>but this is pretty crude.  I'm wondering whether anything else got
>broken in the process.  Anyone know a clean way out of this?  There
>seems to be a lot of ambiguity about when a fully qualified name is
>needed.  For now I just changed /etc/sys_id back to "biome" and use
>/usr/etc/resolv.conf to solve my nameserver problems, but I wonder if
>there is any way to use a fully qualified hostname without breaking uucp?

The following line in /usr/etc/resolv.conf should work:
domain bio.ns.ca