Tips & Tricks

Network Configuration 4.x

Introduction

Description

For the following description we assume that an IRIX system has a fresh install and is about to be installed into a local network which again is connected to the internet. Inside the network at least a DNS server, NIS/YP and NFS are operating. The NFS service is used to export the users homes from a central fileserver to the clients.

Data

The following table gives the data which will be used in the example settings below. Obviously we intend to call the host 'eowyn' and we want to give it a static IP address (192.168.1.22) when connecting it to our network which is described in the following settings:

IP-Address of the host:    192.168.1.22
Hostname:                  eowyn  

IP-Address/Netmask:        192.168.1.xxx/255.255.255.0
Gateway:                   192.168.1.1
DNS-Server:                192.168.1.1
Domainname:                localdomain
YP-Domain:                 localdomain
Fileserver:                files.localdomain

If following these instructions write down the data you need in your environment and make the appropriate changes in the code examples that follow below.

Settings

Basic Configuration

To select a hostname and IP adress the hostname has to be entered in /etc/sys_id (replace IRIS). Then it is necessary to add a corresponding entry to /etc/hosts. In the example this line has to look like the following one:

192.168.1.22    eowyn.localdomain       eowyn

Routing

Adding a default route is rather complicated. The usual way is to add a new startup skript named network.local to /etc/init.d. Here is a sample as it has been posted to usenet previously (attn. this version is modified to match the example):

 #!/bin/sh
#
# /etc/init.d/network.local
#
# Define a default route to a smart gateway
#
# The following links are required:
#
# ln -s /etc/init.d/network.local /etc/rc0.d/K39network.local
# ln -s /etc/init.d/network.local /etc/rc2.d/S31network.local

case "$1" in
'start')
/usr/etc/route add default 192.168.1.1 1
;;

'stop')
/usr/etc/route delete default 192.168.1.1 1
;;

*)
echo "usage: $0 {start|stop}"
;;
esac

The links have to be created as it is noted in the comment of the above script. While booting or shutting down init will call the script with the appropriate parameter and thus make it add/delete the default route.

Resolver

Configuring the resolver is pretty easy. To have the system use DNS as primary means for hostname lookup the file /usr/etc/resolv.conf has to be created and be filled with the following:

hostresorder bind local
domain localdomain
nameserver 192.168.1.1

YP/NIS

No info so far.

Mounting Home

We assume we are mounting /usr/people from a fileserver (not that the files that are in the local directory aren't overwritten - they are just invisible as long as the NFS volume is mounted). The following line has to be added to /etc/fstab to mount the volume at boot time (only if optional NFS software is installed):

files.localdomain:/usr/people /usr/people nfs rw 0 0

If the NFS software is not available automounting won't work. So the volume has to be mounted by hand (or an additional init script):

mount -t nfs files.localdomain:/usr/people /usr/people