gary@pnl-geo.UUCP ( Gary Black ) (03/01/90)
I am having some repeated diffuculty in keeping a NeXT machine alive on a heterogeneous (non-NetInfo) thin ethernet network. It seems that when the network is interrupted temporarily by disconnecting the BNC connector from the Next for instance, the network configuration is lost as well as the link to the user accounts. It comes up logged in automatically as "me" and gives the message "Cannot connect to NetInfo server. Assuming no NetInfo parents" when I inquire about the local configuration with NetManager. It still lists the network configured the way it was when it worked correctly. The interesting aspect is that it will lose the configuration after the machine is powered down before the network is interrupted. Reply to this basenote or sendmail to: gary%vista1@pnlg.pnl.gov on Internet
dml@esl.com (Denis Lynch) (03/06/90)
In article <23460002@pnl-geo.UUCP> gary@pnl-geo.UUCP ( Gary Black ) writes:
I am having some repeated diffuculty in keeping a NeXT machine alive on a
heterogeneous (non-NetInfo) thin ethernet network. It seems that when
the network is interrupted temporarily by disconnecting the BNC connector
from the Next for instance, the network configuration is lost as well as
the link to the user accounts. It comes up logged in automatically as
"me" and gives the message "Cannot connect to NetInfo server. Assuming
no NetInfo parents" when I inquire about the local configuration with
NetManager.
We have no trouble here with a (very large) net of non-NeXT machines,
that happens to have a little NeXT net on it.
If you reboot a NeXT without the network connected, it determines that
it isn't on one (logically enough) and doesn't bring up any of the
NetInfo stuff. There are two things you might want to know:
1) You don't need to power the machine off to disconnect/reconnect
the net. It won't even mind having the net gone for a while.
Just pull the T off the cube, do whatever you need, and put the
T back on when you're done.
2) If you want to bring NetInfo up even though there isn't really
a net connected, do this: Get a T connector, and put a 50-ohm
terminator on EACH arm. Connect that to the cube's ethernet
connector, and it will think it's hooked to a network. (Of
course if the machine isn't a NetInfo Cofiguration Server it
will wait 'til it finds one, which might be a long time!)
We use this trick when we need to cart a machine to another
building for a demo or something.
In other words, your problem has nothing to do with disconnecting the
network, it has to do with booting the machine with the network
disconnected.
Denis Lynch
ESL Inc.gary@pnl-geo.UUCP ( Gary Black ) (03/09/90)
I have found the solution to mye problem through NeXT technical support. Mail to ask_next@next.com is an effective way to get answers where as calling the NeXT support number is not. They only talk with liscensed NeXT developers. The problem was that we (read I) pulled the /etc/hosts file from the system that is serving as the name server for the NeXT but named it something other than hosts. I did an niload hosts . <yourhostsfile as per instructions in the network and system administration manual. This properly fired up the netinfo network daemon and connected to the network until the machine was rebooted. At this time it looked for /etc/hosts but couldn't find it. All that was necessary to remedy the problem was to rename the fi transferredd over to hosts. Since I lost the user accounts without the network, this had to be done by rebooting in single user mode from the monitor. Everything came back properly configured after renaming the fe and rebooting conventionally. I hope this saves someone else this pain because the network and system administration manual does not explicitly tell you what to name the file.