robert@shangri-la.gatech.edu (Robert Viduya) (10/29/89)
Just a word of warning: if your SGI machines are being ypserved from non-SGI ypmaster (ours is a Sun 4/280) and you're planning on upgrading to 3.2, make sure that /etc/services AND /etc/rpc on the ypmaster are merged with the versions on the SGI. Otherwise things break, like the new WorkSpace manager. Another minor "gotcha" that bit me was in the Visual Administration tool. If you let it configure your network for you, it just asks for a hostname and IP address and defaults the other parameters to what it thinks they should be. It was wrong in our case; we use a broadcast address of 128.61.0.0, not 128.61.255.255. In the Visual Administration tool's defense, I will say that I found it to be fairly robust in all other areas. I don't normally use such tools, having learned to distrust them, but whenever I come up against one, I usually give it a try to see how well it works. I prefer the old, "tried-and-true" method of mucking with the system startup scripts and system configuration files directly. SGI's, although somewhat limited in what sysadm tasks it allowed you to do, was pretty solid and didn't even complain when I did things behind its back. robert -- Robert Viduya robert@shangri-la.gatech.edu Office of Computing Services Georgia Institute of Technology (404) 894-6296 Atlanta, Georgia 30332-0275