🚀 go-pugleaf

[Well, I don't have rn and Pnews back at MSRI, and my first post got
stuck in Santa Cruz (kind of poetic justice), so here goes again]

I'm in the midst of doing upgrades to our NeXTs. Since they were
mainly ignored before I got here, the old 2.n installation is a
mess, so I decided to do a clean install, and make the six NeXTs
in our network run NetInfo. I have several questions.

        1) Most pressing, the very first client that I got up doesn't
find the master netinfo server. At boot time I get the:

Still searching for parent network administration (NetInfo) server.
Please wait, or press 'c' to continue without network user accounts.
See your system administrator if you need help.

message. I looked in the mirror, but wasn't able to help myself.
On the server, I see:

thales(joe) nidomain -l
tag=network udp=671 tcp=673
tag=local udp=670 tcp=672
thales(joe) ps ax | grep netinfo
   69 ?  S     0:03 /usr/etc/netinfod local
   70 ?  S     0:08 /usr/etc/netinfod network

which makes me think that netinfod is ok there. On the client, I only
see the local stuff. How does the client know where to look for the
server? Have I accepted some default timeout which is too short?
How can I force the client to read the network netinfo stuff from
the server? Needless to say, I've already RTFM'ed this, but found
no light.

        2) The bulk of our network is administered through NIS. I plan
to make the master Netinfo server a clone NIS server. Are there any
problems with this that I might avoid? Is there a clever way to
automagically keep the NIS and NetInfo stuff in sync? I'm especially
interested in the user accounts, since they are all system-wide and
we have a considerable turnover of accounts as visitors come and go.

        3) I seem to recall that under 2.n, administrative data was
first sought in the local NetInfo domain, ... , then in the /
netinfo domain, then in NIS, sort of like adding a + to the end
of /etc/foo. Is there some way to do this with 3.0?

Joe Christy   |      Head of Mathematical Computing      | Two wrongs
joe@msri.org  | Mathematical Sciences Research Institute | don't make a right,
(510)643-6069 |          1000 Centennial Drive           | but three lefts do
**************|           Berkeley, CA 94720             |********************