On Mon, 2009-04-20 at 20:47 +0200, dick hoogendijk wrote:
> On Mon, 20 Apr 2009 20:38:40 +0200
> Gilles Gravier <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> > Furthermore, just turning off one service that apparently isn't
> > directly linked to GDM should not block GDM from running... at least
> > NOT without some clear warning of what is happening or about to
> > happen.
> 
> I always still are surprised to see my OpenSolaris/nevada desktop
> machines become unusable if I do some system maintainance (init S) on
> the server. The desktops use the DNS service running on them.
> I think *network only* should not be possible then. Not the freeze of a
> complete desktop.

Interesting; the desktops I manage use DNS and NIS, yet I've never
experienced any system-wide "hangs" due to name servers going down.  I
think that part of the responsibility for this lies with the
administrator, and part of it lies in the design of the system.

There are certainly ways to configure a system with fragile dependencies
on naming.  For example, having something like this in nsswitch.conf:

hosts:  dns files
or
hosts:  nis files

These things don't make sense.  If the name server is unreachable,
applications that (erroneously or not) depend on resolving the local
hostname will hang.  Yet, the default nsswitch.nis file that ships with
the system has this problem (see CR 6465090 default nsswitch.nis file is
not grounded in reality).

This is as fragile as, say, putting NFS mounts in $PATH and expecting
the shell to keep working when an NFS server is unreachable.

Anyway, if you know of areas that could obviously be improved, then
please file bugs.

-Seb


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