386i on non-sun network

[Bruce L. Rosen]

After a great deal of grief and (in my view) unnecessary learning of "how
to be a Unix Systems Programmer," I was able to get my Sun386i machine to
behave as a normal node on a heterogenous network.  The steps outlined
below may not be exactly what everyone out there needs, but it worked for
my own case, and may be a helpful guide for other Sun386i users.   I
originally sent this off a number of weeks ago directly in response to an
earlier query on the same issue.

The steps are basically:

1. Get the machine back to the unconfigured state (see the unconfigure
   command .... make sure to back up user data first!  Other alternative
   is to modify the unconfigure script).

2. sync/halt the machine

3. pull the plug on the network and stuff a terminator in.

4. reboot

5. Configure the machine as a master server in its own domain.

6. turn OFF yellow pages altogether by renaming /usr/etc/ypbind and
   /usr/etc/ypserv (see Network and Communications Administration, page 369).

7. Now do whatever edits you want to do to the /etc/xxxx files (hosts,
   passwd, group, fstab, rc.local, inetd.conf, or whatever).

8. You now ought to be able to sync/halt, plug the network back in, and
   reboot.

9.  BEWARE of editing any but the obvious files in /etc. I once edited the
net.conf file to change the HOSTNAME entry and, believe it or not, was
unable to boot the machine.  The boot failure gave no useful indication of
why it was failing.  I had to fix this by booting from diskette and
sweating a lot until I finally guessed how to mount the root file system,
so I could undo my edits.

This is how I have my machine configured and it works fine.

The down side is that SNAP will not work without YP.  If you want to use
SNAP, then you must use YP.  If that's the case, then don't do step 6.
For step 7, do the changes in the yp... versions of the files which have
yp... versions (like yppasswd, ypgroup) or in the plain versions for those
that don't (like hosts), and then remake the YP maps.  Just editing the
files doesn't do anything if you are using YP; you must remake the YP maps
for the changes to take effect (cd /var/yp; make).  This is pretty well
described in Sun386i Advanced Administration, chapter 2.  If SNAP feels
that anything is out of sync, it won't let you do much of anything.  I
understand, though, that it 4.01, SNAP will at least put a more useful "I
won't do it" message.  [Judging from what I've seen on sun-spots here,
many 386i users are choosing to not use SNAP anyway.]

Hope this has been helpful.  I am feeling particular grumpy about how Sun
did this, since it has cost me a LOT of time to finally settle on the
steps above.  Furthermore, I just installed SunOS 4.01 yesterday and, yes,
it required a complete rebuild of the machine.

Good luck.

- Bruce Rosen
  BBN Software Products