Hi everyone. Thanks to Cliff Krieger
Richard Eisenman
Eric Crane
Tom Barkanic
Lucio Chiappetti
for their kind responses.
My original, somewhat badly stated question was :
I have an Alpha 255.300 running DU 3.2g. I've run ypsetup on the alpha,
and it's now a YP(NIS) client of a DECstation running ULTRIX 4.3A.
I also have the users partition mounted to the ALPHA. However, all
the paths are different in DU (e.g. /usr/bin/X11/dxterm vs
/usr/bin/dxterm
on the ULTRIX machine. An "rsh" or an rlogin to the alpha is no
problem, but
I'd like for users to be able to login at the alpha. I could check to
see what
the hostname is and execute a script that would correct the path, but
this would hose the remote logins.
Is there an easy way to do this? Am I overlooking the obvious solution?
Should I just add users and forget about the alpha being a YP(NIS)
client?
Thanks in advance, for any suggestions!
from Cliff:
On the Ultrix box make a symbolic link from /usr/bin/X11 to /usr/bin.
Then change everyones path to the new format.
The altenative would involve too many links to be practical.
from Richard:
The way we deal with this is to create a default .login or .profile
which
assigns the path after checking the architecture with uname, i.e., if
uname
-s returns OSF1, we assign one path, if it returns ULTRIX, we assign
another, and so on for any architecture we support.
from Eric:
I remember this happening to me when I went to Ultrix 4.4 also. What I
see on my Ultrix 4.4 systems now is that /usr/bin/dxterm is a link to
/usr/bin/X11/dxterm. Also if you are doing this in some sort of script
you can either stat the file to see if it exists or set a path that
includes both directories.
>From Tom:
You will have this problem with any mixed architecture. The easyest
thing to
do on the Alpha is add all the paths you want to the system login files:
/etc/cshrc.login and /etc/profile. That way the users .cshrc or
.profile file
should just append there paths to $PATH. NIS has nothing to do with
your
problems. Hope this helps.
P.S. If I were you I would move everything over to the Alpha and make
the
Ultrix machine the client.
>From Lucio:
I'm afraid I do not understand where is your problem.
We've been having in the past a mixed environment (SunOS and Ultrix)
with
NIS-based user accounts, and have now a mixed SunOS and DU
environment.
Of course *lots* of paths (not just the X11 applications) are
different !
This won't preclude logging in, just requires setting $PATH and/or
defining aliases according to the system one is logging in.
We used some combination of "uname" and "machine" to get the OS at the
beginning of .cshrc and then switch to conditional parts according to
the OS.
We have no mixed Ultrix/DU case, since we dropped our Ultrix boxes as we
passed to DU. I guess that there you might have problems logging into
the
X11 environment (via Xprompter on Ultrix and via xdm on DU) if you want
to
use a common X startup environment (e.g. the Autostartup feature and the
fact that the paths for dxterm and alike are different).
I may suggest you to read the O'Reilly X Window Sys Adm guide (which
came with
the documentation pack for DU) and the DEC addendum to it. Since most of
the
things are kept in X resources, I believe there are ways to have
separate
.Xdefaults (and/or personalized dxsession startup files) based on the
hostname. That will require a bit of experimenting.
Otherwise, IF you problem is just a matter of paths, you could consider
one of
two OS as "prime" and the other one as "subsidiary". On the subsidiary
system
create soft-links so that executables will be found in either places.
(We used
that in the past when linking programs requiring libX.a and alike to be
in
some place like /usr/lib when they were actually located in different
places).
end of responses
My original problem should have been stated as an X problem. I don't
want to change the $PATH if the user is remotely logging in, only if the
user is logging in DIRECTLY at the Alpha. Specifically, I DO NOT want
to change the $PATH when the user uses
rsh or rlogin - that user will still be using Xws on ULTRIX, not xdm on
Digital UNIX( even though uname will return the alpha's name) As Lucio
pointed out, I need a personalized .Xdefaults or dxsession startup file
based on the hostname. Right now, each user has a .Xdefaults file that
has pathnames that are correct for ULTRIX, and not correct for Digital
UNIX. Changing/Adding to the path based on uname doesn't affect the
application definitions stored in the .Xdefaults file.
I don't have a doc set for DU, but will try to borrow the O'Reilly X
Window Sys Adm guide that Lucio spoke about.
Thanks again , for all the responses!
Kathleen Morrison
morrison_at_apollo.jhuapl.edu
Received on Mon Nov 18 1996 - 21:33:24 NZDT