bates@stat.wisc.edu (Douglas Bates) (07/27/89)
For the last couple of days I have been working on getting up a NeXT only network with one server using a 660 Mb. SCSI drive and several diskless clients. I managed to do so based on some documentation from our local Computer Center support person and a bit of guessing (such as the need for a /private/etc/bootparams file and its format). I noticed that the server then had two netinfo domains, "/" and ".", with directories "network.nidb" and "local.nidb" in /private/etc/netinfo. Since I wanted users to have logins across the whole group of machines, I put all their logins into the network database using nidump passwd .| niload passwd / That worked fine. Flushed with confidence, I did the same to "hosts" but that created some duplicate entries. For example, there was both 128.105.5.32 wingra 128.105.5.32 wingra.stat.wisc.edu when what I wanted was 128.105.5.32 wingra.stat.wisc.edu wingra I had earlier had this happen in the local domain (I think due to some information implanted from /private/etc/bootptab at boot time) and had eliminated the first entry with niutil -destroy . /machines/wingra so now I ran niutil -destroy / /machines/wingra That proceded to hang all the netinfo access. If I try to reboot the server or any client they will hang after starting netinfo with a "netinfo timeout: sleeping" message. It appears that the network domain information was trashed. I tried to move the directory /private/etc/netinfo/network.nidb to another name not ending in .nidb so it would be ignored by nibindd but now there is no "network" domain and machines will hang if they try to boot while connected to the network. I tried to create a new network domain with nidomain -m network which completes ok and produces the expected directory but any requests such as niload hosts / < /etc/hosts produce an error. I have a feeling that there is some magic involved in the creation of the "network" domain so it is recognized as "/" and forms the root domain. Can anyone give me any pointers? (I am going off tomorrow to a couple of conferences so replies that CC:'d thomson@vms.macc.wisc.edu or kademan@stat.wisc.edu would be appreciated)