fqoj@vax5.CIT.CORNELL.EDU (05/31/89)
We have been struggling with 0.9 for almost three weeks now and I still have problems with NetInfo (NI). If anyone can help with the following problems or with suggestions on where to go next (no puns) please don't hesitate to post, write, send snail mail, flame, etc. 1) We're still a little confused about how the "domains" work. The configuration server is domain "/", and super-user on that machine should be able to write to any other domain, right? Well, the following failed: niload -v printcap /<clientname> < /Users/root/printcap with an error message about improper permission. Why are we trying to do this? Well, as others have posted here, printing is a real problem under 0.9. We are trying to go right by the NeXT book. We're setting up diskless clients on a NeXT-only network with some NeXT lasers attached to two of these clients. The configuration servers are two 660MB cubes. We have applied the proper fstab, passwd, and group files and performed niload -v <file> / < /User/root/<file> with no problem. All the clients boot diskless and with fairly good throughput so far. BUT (you knew it!) all the clients seem to want to listen to their own passwd and group files also. As I understand it, the path of searching domains is / then .. then . right? We wanted the diskless clients to just see the / database. There's no reason to have other databases on these machines since they don't and won't have local disks. The documentation is pretty scimpy here. Local machines need to have an fstab, but do they also need to see a passwd? We have tried just erasing these files but there's an obvious security hole. Anyone can boot standalone, create their own passwd and root pass, niload to /<client> and then login as root on that machine whenever they like. Worse than that, it's possible to do nidumps from the / database from the diskless client! There is also a BIG bug in how NI handles group. We'd like our SYSOPs to be in group wheel, then su to root if they need to. This adds another level of passwords to the root entry (we then ** the root password so there is none). This worked great under 0.8 but is broken under 0.9. We also tried to correct some printing problems (no one can see the remote printers except the cubes attached to those printers). So we were trying to niload into /<client> a fixed printcap since an nidump from /<client> showed that the client had a DIFFERENT printcap than the / database. How could this happen? Shouldn't the client find / first then stop looking? We also wanted to follow the book and set up different spool dirrectories for each printer, but no matter what we set with chmod (we set ownership and other rights for daaemon similar to the np directory), during bootup we get error messages from lpd saying that it can't chdir to lw or any other directory. We also have the same problem with hosts which should be under the /machines domain of the / NI database. The servers can find anyone, but the clients can't find anyone not on the local net because they can't see the router address from /. We constantly get a cryptic "generic local error" message when we try to niload the campus host table into hosts for the server's NI database. Is there a size limit for NI databases? Not to rehash a point madde here many times by others, but if NeXT want to make NetInfo the way to go on network management then they should provide much better description and documentation. The on-line stuff helps but it's not nearlyy enough. Can anyone (Avi?) shine some light on the NetInfo dilema? Which database is looked at by whom when and which files are looked at by whom when. For crying out loud, there's no mention of niutil in the NetInfo release notes except to say that it does arbitrary reads and writes to databases. It seems prettry powerful for just a slight blurb like that. Well we finally fired up NetInfo directly but to no avail. This utility is not very intuitive. First there doesn't seem to be a way to ADD things such as new printer or host entries and the only way to delete things is to edit the property field, but no way to add properties! Very disappointing. It probably will be better in 1.0 (I hope). Has anyone out there had better luck with remote printing or network configuration? Please, don't be bashfull! :) Roger Jagoda Systems Coordinator FQOJ@CORNELLA.CIT.CORNELL.EDU Cornell University (607) 255-8960