Is there any idea/interest to include NIS+ stuff into mandrake? The
package nis-utils, by Thorsten Kukuk, has been around for some time now.
At least on Mandrake 6.1-7.0 nis-utils worked without big hassles.
Problems were mostly noted with netscape. Netscape seems to ask for user
identification (UID and user name) over several places of its code.
Unfortunately it does this in a quite buggy manner. On glibc-2.0 builds,
netscape uses calls from "unstandard patches" (btw - officially NIS+ is
not supported in glibc-2.0). Unfortunately I have never seen these
patches reaching official redhat/mandrake builds. Besides it seems that
these patches are highly unstable. Meanwhile, on glibc-2.1 builds,
netscape gets nuts while carrying NIS+ calls (on mail it crashes while
making user/password checks, it makes wrong calls to NIS+ code). The
only NIS+ friendly netscape is the one based on libc5.
With the exception of this everything else seems to work correctly.
There is only the hassle that, sometimes, time gets out of syncho (lag
+3min. between clients & server) and the clients start calling NIS+
servers like crazy (this situation may, frequently, bring down 10Mbit
Ethernet lines).
The inclusion of NIS+ stuff on Mandrake could give a higher integration
to Linux/Solaris networks as, usually, most netadmins prefer the use of
traditional Solaris administrativia.
Ektanoor
