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Date:      Thu, 3 Aug 1995 10:45:54 +0200
From:      pw@lysator.liu.se
To:        questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   YP
Message-ID:  <199508030845.KAA06819@harpenden.lysator.liu.se>

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Hi!

First of all, thanks for a great OS.

I am installing FreeBSD as my first Unix and sort of picking up the
basics of Unix administration as I go along. It means some mistakes,
some reinstallations, but it sure is an effective crash course.

Anyhow, some confusions linger on this my third day that I can't see
myself resolving easily without a little outside assistance.

Main problem is with YP. I fiddle sysconfig so that ypbind is run in
rc, that's fine. After this, ypcat passwd works perfectly. I put that
little + entry in the password file... but this is as far as things go
well. Trying to log in with a non-local user produces about a billion
lines of "yp_order: clnt_call: RPC: Procedure unavailable".

Is this my problem, or the server's? It's a SUN running NIS+. To be
honest, I don't really need YP, but I'm trying to learn how all this
stuff works.

Next, NFS seems to work a little oddly at times. Mounting and such
works brilliantly, no complaints from anything, but when actually
using it I have noticed some problems. I haven't investigated closer
but a symptom is eg moving a tar-file to a NFS-mounted remote system,
then at a later time unpacking from it and finding the file to be short.
If this is not something that makes you go "aha" at once, I will try
to find further symptoms and make a more detailed report.

Next, a suggestion; perhaps the stuff in sysconfig and rc should be
cleaned up re: the use of pcvt as opposed to syscons. I didn't really
have any problem tearing out the syscons stuff and setting up new
configurations for pcvt but since this s one of the things a new user
will look at first, perhaps it might b a good idea.

Oh yes, one more thing: I have spent quite a bit of time trying to sort
out just what parts of the system Kerberos, YP, and DES affect, respectively.
I installed Kerberos, then ripped it out, but I failed to uninstalled it
nicely. Finally I just basically recompiled the whole system. Most confusing
I guess is the DES stuff; I think perhaps you should put further emphasis
on the fact that once outside the US, DES implementions can be used freely.
This is very far from obvious. It is also not obvious just what all these
various secure/ dirs, sources, binary distribs, do... secure_rpc is a good
example of a fairly unfathomable entity. But that's source stuff, I guess
it's not meant for me. :)  All in all, these things would benefit from a
great big explicit README-file. There is lots of help on what keys to press
in the installation program -- fairly uninterseting, in my opinion, -- and
perhaps some lack of information on a more medium level of complexity such
as the things mentioned here: just what the various things do, where they
fit into and what binaries/libraries they affect/recompile/are referred by.

All in all, though, I am vastly impressed by the ease with which I turned
my PC into a computer. Many, many thanks! If there is anything that I, in
my unfortunately fairly unexperienced way, can do, please ask.

Thanks again,
	P. Winzell



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