Problem with interfacing YP and BIND

[Jon J. Brewster]

In v7n111, Mark Prior writes:
>I am trying to get YP to talk to Bind and of course it doesn't work!

>We are not connected to the DDN Internet [ yes I know it's not a supported
>configuration ] but what difference should that make?

One problem you'll surely run into is that the BIND software wants to talk
to a root server as it starts up.  Without a DDN connection, that will
fail, of course.

Another problem, which we see here when the DDN connection goes down,
after in.named is running, is that ypserv seems to bog down.  (We use the
ypserv that interacts with named, so that things like "ping
violet.berkeley.edu" work).  It appears that named hangs on requests that
cannot be answered, which in turn blocks ypserv, which in turn screws up
our entire local domain.  When I substitute the original ypserv then we
are able to operate again, and at least resolve local hostnames, passwd
entries, etc.

>PS I would like to thank Sun Australia for their attempts at persuading
>Sun US that non-connection to the DDN Internet isn't a good enough excuse
>for it not working.

This doesn't sound reasonable.  As you may know, when you request an
address binding from named which is not in your local tables, named
requests the address of a name server for the domain containing the
address in question.  The network contains a number of root servers which
answer these requests.  Without a network, how will your server manage to
get this information?  It seems to me that if you want to use the BIND
system, you'll wind up creating the equivalent of the Internet locally,
including the administrative function of NIC.  I *do* agree that the YP
<-> BIND interface could be improved, so that losing the nameserver (or
not having it) would result in something more graceful than emulating
rigor mortis.