ugh.book

298 NFS

Date: Fri, 5 Jan 90 14:44 CST

From: Chris Garrigues <[email protected]>

Subject: Multiple architecture woes

To: UNIX-HATERS

I’ve been bringing up the X.500 stuff from NYSERnet (which is

actually a fairly nicely put-together system, by Unix standards).

There is a lot of code that you need for a server. I compiled all this

code, and after some struggle, finally got it working. Most of the

struggle was in trying to compile a system that resided across file

systems and that assumed that you would do the compilation as root.

It seems that someone realized that you could never assume that root

on another system was trustworthy, so root has fewer privileges than

I do when logged in as myself in this context.

Once I got the server running, I came to a piece of documentation

which says that to run just the user end, I need to copy certain files

onto the client hosts. Well, since we use NFS, those files were

already in the appropriate places, so I won on all the machines with

the same architecture (SUN3, in this case).

However, many of our machines are SUN4s. There were no instruc-

tions on how to compile only the client side, so I sent mail to the

original author asking about this. He said there was no easy way to

do this, and I would have to start with ./make distribution and rebuild

everything.

Since this is a large system, it took a few hours to do this, but I suc-

ceeded, and after finding out which data files I was going to have to

copy over as well (not documented, of course), I got it working.

Meanwhile, I had been building databases for the system. If you try

and load a database with duplicate entries into your running system,

it crashes, but they provide a program that will scan a datafile to see

if it’s OK. There's a makefile entry for compiling this entry, but not

for installing it, so it remains in the source hierarchy.

Last night, I brought my X.500 server down by loading a broken

database into it. I cleaned up the database by hand and then decided

to be rational and run it through their program. I couldn't find the

program (which had a horrid path down in the source hierarchy).

Naturally enough, it had been deleted by the ./make distribution (Isn't

that what you would call the command for deleting everything?). I