Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!SUN.COM!nowicki From: nowicki@SUN.COM (Bill Nowicki) Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip Subject: Re: Name Server for Local Site. Message-ID: <8807140118.AA12978@speed.sun.com> Date: 14 Jul 88 01:18:01 GMT Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Organization: The Internet Lines: 45 I am looking for a machine to act as a name server for our local site. We have a large, diverse number of machines running TCP/IP. (e.g. IBM, HP, SUN, Apollo, PC, VAX) over our local Ethernet. There is no reason you need to FTP sources and compile, unless you have lots of spare time (or expect the experience to be educational). The Domain Name Server has shipped for almost two years as part of the basic Sun Operating System (since SunOS 3.2). The version in SunOS 4.0, which has been shipping for several months, is based on BIND 4.7.3. The current release under development is based on BIND 4.8. You can obtain an up-to-date version of BIND 4.8 through Sun customer service (ask for the "name server kit" patch tape). Yellow Pages is another network name service that Sun, DEC, HP, and some other vendors are using to name users, groups, aliases, etc. in addition to machines. This is in standard SunOS, PC-NFS, Ultrix 2.0, plus others. There is a mechanism that causes the YP server to optionally use the domain name resolver to look up names outside of the current domain. Unfortunately this was broken in SunOS 4.0; the fix is in the name server kit. While I am at it, let me address a few of the other issues recently discussed on the TCP-IP list. Regarding ARPs: the 0.x.y.z request is an artifact of the old software you are using. SunOS 4.0 got rid of the Network Disk protocol entirely and uses NFS for booting. ARPs for self serve two purposes: warn you if someone else on the net is also set to your IP address, and more importantly flush the caches of other people on the net with your previous Ethernet address. Remember DECnet (and sometimes XNS) requires you to change your Ethernet address. You need this ARP or else your server will continue to send to the old address when you reboot. The current release in development has a simple timer that limits ARP broadcasts to one per second. It also has NFS timers that are automatically determined instead of requiring a user to guess at them. Most NFS implementations already have exponential backoff. On broadcasts: our solution: accept all six kinds of broadcasts, but default to SENDING the old one (net.0 or net.subnet.0) until we can be reasonable assured that all SunOS 3.2 or earlier systems are gone. -- Bill Nowicki Sun Microsystems