[70] in Hesiod
Re: How do I use hesiod efficiently?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (sam@unity.ncsu.edu)
Mon Dec 23 07:07:09 1991
From: sam@unity.ncsu.edu
To: jh@efd.lth.se (Joergen Haegg)
Date: Mon, 23 Dec 91 6:58:03 EST
Cc: hesiod@Athena.MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: <m0kvS8h-0000rsC@baal.efd.lth.se>; from "Joergen Haegg" at Dec 22, 91 1:18 pm
>
> I've unpacked and installed Hesiod version 1.3 (I think :-).
> That's what I found in hesiod.c,v.
>
> Anyway, are there more libraryfunctions available?
> If I would like to use hesiod instead of yp, then I must
> write a number of getpw and getgr functions myself.
> Only getpwnam is defined in the distribution.
>
> And how do people normally use hesiod?
> Is it common to replace all yp-maps?
> (I really would love to do that, our system has grown to much now :-)
>
> --
> Joergen Haegg jh@efd.lth.se postmaster@efd.lth.se
We use Track to maintain files on all of our machines. It has its limitations,
however, like it does not lend itself well to machine by machine differences.
The capability you get with YP/NIS by having local data in the files on each
machine and global data in the YP distribution. The same could be done with
Hesiod, maybe someone is doing this now?
One place that the BIND distribution failed for us is that the nntp-xfer
program is setup for IN class zones only. We modified the primary/secondary
line syntax to specify the class with "in" or "hs". Then we added this to a
struct so that when it was time to exec nntp-xfer the zone type could
be passed to it on the command line.
We now do not use zone transfers for HS data, but propagate the name server
database in another way. Some people might have a problem with zone
transfering the HS data. Without Moira it was the easiest way for us
to maintain our Hesiod servers.
We did not want to duplicate YP, so functions to do it are not important to
us. It would be nice to have all standard passwd library functions go to
Hesiod. Ultrix Hesiod used CNAME records to order the passwd records so
that the functions that go thru the passwd file line by line will still
work(entry1 hs cname albert, entry2 hs cname burt). I can't remember if
this is a product of the MIT distribution.
It would be nice to here how people use Hesiod to function more in a YP
fashion to provide access to setup files like services, printcap, etc. And
in using that way can it be implemented so that the local file can
be scanned first.
Sam Moore
