yppasswd on SUNs

[Skip Egdorf at Los Alamos National Laboratory]

> I have a need to develop a yppasswd interface for a non-SUN machine
> (specifically, a LISP Machine), ...
>
> Or is there an easier way to do all this?

There is indeed a better way to do this on a Lisp machine.  A company
called International Lisp associates has developed an RPC/NFS for the
Symbolics from the public specs. I have been using this for some time now,
and it works very well.

I believe that Symbolics has picked this up from ILA and is now supporting
it on Genera 7.2. See your Lisp machine vendor for details.

I am not sure if yppasswd itself is supported, but the RPC code is all in
place and user accessable (with a nice 'defrpc' macro that does much of
what the rpcgen compiler does in a lisp'ish sort of way) with hooks to YP
for things like user names.  Even if yppasswd is not supported, the
underlying structure gives you a whale of a start.

Two war stories:

I added an IBM PC with PC/NFS to the ethernet, mounted 'Symbolics:>' as D:
and ran the output of a knowledge-based application through Microsoft
Chart for a PC-user. Those who had been trying to string a serial line and
chant arcane gibberish at both machines to get the files copied were...
well, pleased at the speed with which it worked.  (was there supposed to
be a Sun there somewhere???)

Some of our 3650 users report Better performance from NFS mounted
filesystems than from local disks.

Good luck on the yppasswd quest. Let us (the net) know how you do.

	Skip Egdorf
	hwe at lanl.gov