[SunRescue] help a guy run 2.6 on his 670MP

[Dave McGuire]

On May 17, Brian Hechinger wrote:
> >  Yes it does.  It's capable of amazing amounts of work on even the
> > slowest of hardware.  And on fast hardware, it's GODLIKE! 8-)
> 
> that's not even the cool selling point.  it runs on a freakin sun2 for crying
> out loud.  talk about your mondo geek points. :)

  Yes! 8-)

> >   I'm told that 8 is broken out-of-the-box...the DNS resolver doesn't
> > work or something like that?  Sun is a stuck on NIS and NeXT was on
> > NetInfo...and they both suck big hairy moose weenies.
> 
> BS.  on both accounts. (don't know about NetInfo)

  Ahem.

  Mike Nicewonger explained the DNS thing in an earlier message.  He
stated that it only works if your resolver is on your subnet, and
blows up otherwise.  He also stated that there is a patch for this
problem.  My comments were for discussion, exchange of opinion, and
possible correction...not to start a flamewar.  Don't act like I'm
attacking Solaris...the fact that I'm basing a new business on it
should say a lot coming from me; as some poeple here know that I've
despised Solaris since day one and have only recently started using it
in its latest releases.

  And no, there's no BS to *my opinion* that both NIS (both
incarnations) and NetInfo suck big hairy moose weenies.  I make my
point below.

> DNS works fine out of the box for me on every sol7 and sol8 box i have ever
> installed.  no tweaking needed.

  See Mike's info in his earlier message.  And I wasn't talking about
7, only 8.

> would you rather use NIS or add user accounts to hundreds of sun boxen?  me?
> i'll use NIS anyday.  NIS+ on the other hand.....

  There are better/cleaner/faster/more secure ways of doing it.  I've
run big networks too, man.  Yes, NIS (NetInfo, or similar systems) are
capable of making the task easier.  That doesn't make them the right
solution in all cases.  I firmly believe that any tool that makes
system configuration files and/or authentication control files
accessible/administrable from the outside network is a bad idea.

  I've had far too many bad experiences helping people mop up the
remains of their networks after some script kiddie used ypsnarf (or
ypsnarf+) to snag someone's passwd file and sent half the passwords on
the system to his favorite IRC channel.  And before you argue with
that: Yes, there are ways of preventing that, like firewalling the
sunrpc port or whatever...but in practical terms, a lot of people
don't DO that.

  Under NeXTSTEP (OpenSTEP, OS/X, whatever it's called this week), with
NetInfo (which is NOT removable/disableable, etc) for example, you
can't simply edit /etc/printcap to add a new printer.  I beat on the
damn thing for hours until someone finally told me "oh, the OS ignores
all that old stuff in /etc.."  I was furious.

> i haven't really checked up on it since then.  it does run balls to the wall on
> the PCI boxen though.  missing some hardware support, but mostly stuff that
> tends to live in big SMP machines anyway, so not a big problem.

  Is the PCI support decent?  Can I take random PCI cards that work on
other NetBSD ports and stick 'em in a PCI Ultra nowadays?  That would rock.

> >   Yes they have.  It's all online on their web server.  If you want to
> > see even the actual assembler instructions, with enough context to
> > make them useful, download and install the VIS SDK (it's free) and
> > look at the *.il files in the lib/ directory.
> 
> i'll definitely have to add that to my super long list of things to do. :)

  I know the feeling. :) I've only got the time to work with the VIS
stuff now because it's a big part of my current keep-food-on-the-table
project.


                    -Dave McGuire