sboyle@mbunix.mitre.org (Stephen V. Boyle) (08/10/89)
In article <1989Aug9.133139.4133@ee.rochester.edu> deke@ee.rochester.edu (Dikran Kassabian) writes: >I feel like its time to add my $.02 here. Security is indeed one con- >sideration here, but so is 'correct' network behaviour. Not everyone >is network connected to the arpanet, but those who are have additional >concerns. The majority of posters addressing security have been talking about booting from the OD, but no one has mentioned the holes in NetInfo. Personally, I'm at least equally concerned with the NetInfo model and behavior. It's fairly trivial to make any machine behave as the NetInfo master, and it's no fun at all to get the Cube to behave in an Ethernet/YP environment that is not pure NeXT. NetInfo is fine for anyone who wants to use it. What I don't understand is why it gets in the way of other things. If NeXT is really serious about selling into a university environment, then there should have been (should be) a lot more emphasis on making the machine behave in a heteregeneous network environment. Many of the people in my System Support class are administering networks of 100+ systems, and you can bet that they don't have 100+ Cubes. I'd be happy if I could just turn off NetInfo without having to resort to tricks like destroying databases, etc. Now it may be that I'm very confused, in that I missed something that would make life easier with NetInfo, or that there are some extrememely compelling reasons why NetInfo wasn't designed to co-exist YP, et. al. I realize that many of the features of NetInfo are there to support the "world on a floptical" concept, but from what I've seen so far, that just isn't how the machines are being used.