sheryl@seas.gwu.edu (Sheryl Coppenger) (06/04/91)
Sorry for the delay in summarizing, but I was hoping that more packages would turn up. As it turns out, more than half of the replies to my query consisted of "me too"s from 3 continents. This is what I have found: 1) Mcp - got good reviews from people using it, but they made significant mods. Mcp and the diskhog2 should be available at your local comp.sources.unix ftp site. Mcp does not support YP/NIS in the version popularly available. 2) ACMAINT - Developed at Purdue, this package has its own daemon and does not require YP/NIS for distribution of data bases. Get a copy of the overview paper from harbor.ecn.purdue.edu in ~ftp/pub/ACmaint.ps.Z. The beta version also can be ftpd from that location. 3) Moira - Part of the Athena Project. I sent a request for information to info-athena@athena.mit.edu last Thursday morning and haven't received a reply yet. Word on the street is that it's a good package but requires a lot of maintenance (2 full-time people at one site I heard). Also requires purchase of Ingres data base, which is not cheap. 4) Asmodeus - developed at Oregon State about the same time as ACMAINT and is mentioned in the ACMAINT paper. It is similar in concept to ACMAINT but uses multiple daemons. See the ACMAINT paper for more information. Unfortunately, none of these packages (except mcp) is what I had in mind. Even mcp will require a lot of changes if we use it. I expect we'll wind up upgrading our current ksh scripts, possibly rewriting the whole in PERL. There was a lot of discussion in the ACMAINT article about the desirability of doing away with YP/NIS. In my previous job we avoided YP like the plague because even the vendor told us it was a resource hog. Considering that we were writing realtime applications, that was probably a good choice. In this environment, however, YP/NIS doesn't seem to be that bad. At any rate, it's way down on the hog list. If anybody wants to respond with their YP/NIS experiences pro/con, feel free. Many thanks to those who did reply with package suggestions, and good luck to those who also were searching. -- Sheryl Coppenger SEAS Computing Facility Staff sheryl@seas.gwu.edu The George Washington University (202) 994-6853