Thanks once again to Dr. Tom Blinn, who is probably the real reason
Compaq bought out DEC. I forward herewith his response:
------- Start of forwarded message -------
To: "Robert L. McMillin" <rlm_at_syseca-us.com>
Subject: Re: joind w/ bootp: undocumented name restriction (no '_' allowed)?
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sat, 07 Feb 98 13:31:10 PST."
<9802072131.AA20963_at_brain.syseca-us.com>
Date: Mon, 9 Feb 1998 09:46:11 -0800
From: "Dr. Tom Blinn, 603-884-0646" <tpb_at_zk3.dec.com>
> We have some Jupiter X terms floating around here that we wanted to have
> boot via bootp. We have joind running as a bootp server on an
> Alphaserver 2100 running 4.0B. (These X terms were using config data in
> their NVRAM, but that's dangerous from a management standpoint.) I
> tried some time ago to get this working, but failed. Today, I thought
> to rename the machines and lose the underscores, and lo and behold, it
> worked. Does anyone know of an undocumented restriction on the '_'
> character in names when using bootp/joind?
I got this reply from our very expert networks engineer:
The underscore character is not allowed per RFC952, the
hostname RFC. Most of the system daemons don't disallow this
character, but apparently bootpd is an exception.
So what you're trying to do is disallowed by the relevant RFC. The fact
that some system software permits it could be interpreted as meaning that
the other software violates the standard, but it's unlikely we'll "fix" the
other components.
Net outcome: If you want to use joind/bootp you need to use node names that
don't have underscores.
------- End of forwarded message -------
--
Robert L. McMillin | Not the voice of Syseca, Inc. | rlm_at_syseca-us.com
Personal: rlm_at_helen.surfcty.com | rlm_at_netcom.com
Put 'rabbit' in your Subject: or my spam-schnauzer will eat your message.
Received on Mon Feb 09 1998 - 19:00:34 NZDT