On Wed, 29 Jan 1997, I wrote about the following problem:
> We just updated a few Alphas to Digital Unix 4.0B and ran into
> a problem, mounting nfs filesystems, when the file server hostname
> is not in the /etc/hosts file. We get the error:
> Can't get net id for host
>
> The /etc/svc.conf file has hosts=local,bind,yp
> Is it a rule in Digital Unix 4.0 that the remote hostname has to be in
> the hosts file, for nfs mounts?
>
> We are using a load balancing name server for some of our
> filesystem servers and so the host name used is not in the /etc/hosts file.
> This worked fine with Digital Unix 3.2g.
The problem turned out to be in the way we were doing the name serving
for load balancing. Apparently, Digital changed the resolver functions
in DU 4.0.
The earlier version asked the nameserver to do a recursive
query. We took advantage of this behavior to implement load-balancing
for some hosts by giving authoritative resolution for those names
to a second (patched) name server.
It looks like 4.0 changed to an iterative query process (ie
the resolver does the work of querying successive nameservers for
information) and the way 4.0 implements an iterative query doesn't
allow us to point at another nameserver for resolution of
a bottom-level address.
Thanks alot to the folks who sent suggestions.
Valerie Caro
valerie_at_cs.umass.edu
Received on Tue Feb 11 1997 - 22:58:49 NZDT