Replacement needed for bin/mail on Sun 386i

[Gordon C. Galligher]

In article <1140 at brazos.Rice.edu> stefan at lynx.astro.utoronto.ca (Stefan Mochnacki) writes:
>X-Sun-Spots-Digest: Volume 8, Issue 108, message 1 of 21
>
>Ref: v8n50
>
>The binmail on the 386i (4.0.1) has built-in dependence on Yellow Pages.
>The fix to get mail working on my de-YP'ed 386i was to get BSD 4.3 source

I had a similar problem, but it wasn't restricted to only 'mail'!  I then
tried to set up our network of 386i's with one master and the rest slaves
and had major problems when any of the slaves went down.  (I also had the
problem when the power was turned off for more than two days and tried to
reboot the machine it complained about not finding the boot server (even
though there NEVER was a boot server).  The only fix for this was to re-
install the ENTIRE operating system from the diskettes! :-(

My fix to both of these problems was to short-circuit the Yellow Pages
problem.  Since the software is absolutely dependent upon running yellow
pages, I have allowed it to do so.  I have set up all of the 386i's to run
yellow pages and they all are masters.  Their domains are the same names
as their hostname.  They also don't have any slaves on the network to
worry about.  I still NFS stuff from all of them and I have no problems
with that at all.  They are all happy because they are running yellow
pages, they all have a master, they are their own slaves, and they are on
their own domain.  This allows things like 'mail' and the 'netgroups' file
to work, while not causing any headaches from the brain-damaged YP stuff.
It was remarkably easy and I'm really not sure WHY it worked, but it did.
Good luck and happy hunting.

		-- Gordon.

-- 
Gordon C. Galligher  <|> ...!uunet!telxon!gorpong <|> gorpong at telxon.uu.net
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