A colleague of mine with little Unix administration experience has recently
received an used Alpha 255 which has been firmware-converted from OpenVMS to
Tru64 by Compaq staff, and immediately upgraded to version 5.0 of Tru64 by
a colleague of another institute.
Now this colleague wants to somewhat integrate this machine with the remainder
of our other workstations, which is NIS based, and is composed mostly by Suns,
plus 3 Alphas with DU 3.2 (the latter are under my control. For reasons linked
to other s/w I have I do not intend to upgrade now, however we made a sort of
deal that I'd have access to his system as a test bed for future upgrade, and
I will give him hints).
However in a quick glance today I've noticed some differences which slightly
(more or less) puzzle me. We do not have V5.0 documentation at hand, so I hope
the list can give ME some quick hints.
(1) DNS and NIS configuration
the 5.0 machine appears correctly configured for what concerns DNS.
I plan to do NIS configuration soon.
However on my 3.2 system I have not only svc.conf, but also a file
/etc/svcorder. This file is missing on 5.0 (no man page either).
Is this a harmless change ?
(2) sendmail question
all our other machines have sendmail 8.9.1 from sendmail.org,
configured with relay blocking and domain masquerading.
The 5.0 machine apparently comes with sendmail 8.8.8 bundled with the
OS. Is it recommended to re-install 8.9.x over it, or can the OS-bundled
version be used ?
Also the sendmail executable has funny permissions rwS------
owned by root.bin, and gives a "cannot execute" error from root.
Why is that ?
(my sendmail has r-sr-xr-x and is owned by root.mem)
(3) imap question
At the moment a couple of my colleagues (which should go on the 5.0
system) read mail via PC-pine and an imapd (Washington.edu) running
on a Sun. We'd like to move them on the 5.0 Alpha.
I saw that it ships with an imapd bundled with the OS. I suspect it
is a Cyrus imapd and not the washington.edu imapd I know well.
Any comment whether I should prefer one or the other ?
(4) su question
In general I like to be able to telnet as root into my machines, and
also, when logged in at the console, to do "su" and become root, and
then run some X based applications.
I remember I did some changes on MY systems (ptys in /etc/securettys,
adding me to the system group, a few changes in /var/X11/xdm and listing
the machine name in /etc/X0.hosts). I've done all this on the 5.0
system but the /var/X11/xdm (I suppose with CDE that's not used), of
course I added my collegaue, not me, to the system group.
However if he is logged at the console, su's root, and runs an X
application, gets a "can't connect to server" unless he does an
xhost +machinename BEFORE the su. The purpose of my changes was
exactly to get rid of this.
What is the correct way under CDE ?
(5) advfs question
The machine has been configured by the other guy with advfs. I use
ufs on my systems. Also he has three filesets (are they called so ?)
- one for / (on the same 1 GB physical disk as swap)
- one for /usr and one for /var (on a 4 GB disk)
I am not familiar at all with advfs. My questions are :
- would it be difficult / worthwhile to go back to ufs ?
- will the fact he is using advfs and the 4 GB size create problems
when we export the home directories to (some of) our Suns ?
Also he has home directories on /usr/users/xxxx, while our local
convention for all other machines is that home directories are on
/machinename/xxxx.
If I create a soft-link /machinename -> /usr/users and export that,
will the home dir be mounted smoothly by the automounter on Sun ?
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Lucio Chiappetti - IFCTR/CNR - via Bassini 15 - I-20133 Milano (Italy)
For more info :
http://www.ifctr.mi.cnr.it/~lucio/personal.html
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Received on Mon Apr 10 2000 - 17:03:07 NZST