remote problems with SunOS 4.1.1

[Robert Togneri]

Having recently become the proud system manager of a Sparcstation 2
running SunOS 4.1.1 I have found some buggy behaviour. In reality its the
difference in behaviour between the Sparc and three SGI Personal Irises
(OS 3.1d) that we have been using. Here follows my problems:

1. I need to setup a guest login without a password and for security
   reasons I have to treat remote users from outside differently than local
   users. On the iris I look the REMOTEHOST variable which tells me the
   remote login host. Alas on the Sun this variable is undefined.  When
   logging in I can get around this by looking at the host field in the utmp
   file (messy), but what if somebody does an rsh? That is, is there a way of
   knowing the remote hostname when a user tries to do a rsh (or even
   rexecd)? I need to know this from .cshrc.

2. Our Sparc and Irises have cross-mounted NFS areas, all our user
   accounts are on the Irises. I have also enabled rexd for the on command
   but doing 'on -i sparc' will cause a hang when exiting the program (or
   shell) there is no such problem when doing 'on -i iris' or 'on sparc'.
   This happens if I run 'on -i sparc' from both the sparc itself or one of
   our irises.

3. The bg option for the mount program doesn't work as expected. If the
   host that I'm trying to mount is down then rather than backgrounding the
   mount program will stay in the foreground. This does not happen with our
   irises. Interestingly I have managed the Sun mount to background when
   trying to mount a host on the other side of the country! I think the
   reason was that this host was up but did not support NFS (if it did I
   would get an access denied). This has forced me to use automount which I'd
   rather not use as long as our network is small.

If anybody can shed some light on these problems (are they real SunOS bugs
or I'm doing something wrong) I would appreciate it.

Dr. Roberto Togneri                         Phone: +61-9-380-2535
NEDLANDS WA 6009 Australia                  Email: robert at swanee.ee.uwa.oz.au