🚀 go-pugleaf

merlyn@iwarp.intel.com (Randal L. Schwartz) writes:

>In article <1991May22.224555.2248@ariel.unm.edu>, pkrause@triton (Paul Krause CIRT) writes:
>| Only a little.  We have had multiple cases of people erasing their hard drive
>| and copying all the files from someone else with a resulting conflict.  We 
>| did have an employee quit, another person start using his machine and him
>| then coming back and getting a 2nd number.  It does not require a large
>| intuitive leap to envision more "interesting" problems that I don't know
>| about yet.

>You know, if the boxes supported RARP, and you had a RARP server, you
>wouldn't have these problems.  Ether addresses are pretty darn unique
>and can't be copied just by copying hard disks.

This is exactly how we tackled this problem execpt that we use bootp rather
than RARP. We have a lot of publicly accessable PC attached to the net which
are used either on Novell or as terminals to bigger systems (We have every
from MVS on down :-(.) and we had constant problems with people swapping
boot disks around and so on. What we do now is have the termial emulator 
software on a Novell server and use bootp to serv IP addesses. With bootp
you can get about 80 chars of other infomation as well (intended to supply
name of boot program and parameters etc) and we use this to tell the 
terminal emulator various details about the hardware it is running on eg.
what type of keyboard the machine has. This approach also means that we 
can upgrade the software by relplacing one file rather than driving the 
technicians to distraction by changing the disketts in dozens of PCs.

We are also encouraging private users of PCs to register with us so they
don't have to worry about their configuration files. 

BTW we are running a locally written terminal emulator with the IP stuff
borrowed from NCSA telnet, which has support for both RARP and BOOTP.

People with UNIX workstation are *assumed* to know what they are doing :-)
and IP address for these are allocated on a departmental bases like others
have described.


-- 
Russell Fulton, Computer Center, University of Auckland, New Zealand.
<rj_fulton@aukuni.ac.nz>