Tips & Tricks

Network Configuration 6.5

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.

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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 has been made easier in this release. By default the file /etc/config/static-route.options should contain the following:

# static-route.options
#
#  The network startup script, /etc/init.d/network, invokes this
#  script to set static routes.  Site-dependent static routes should
#  be put here.  
#
#  Because name services are not active when this file is invoked, any
#  names used here should be defined in /etc/hosts.
#
#  Read `man route`.
#
#  Since $ROUTE and $QUIET are set in /etc/init.d/network, it is
#  convenient to use `route` commands similar to the following here:
#
#       $ROUTE $QUIET add -net 10 192.0.2.3
#  or
#       $ROUTE $QUIET add 192.168.1.1 192.0.2.5

The variables $ROUTE and $QUIET are set by the script that calls static-route.options and need not be defined here. The line for adding the default route of our example looks like this:

$ROUTE $QUIET add net default 192.168.1.1

Resolver

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

domain localdomain
nameserver 192.168.1.1

Additionally the file /etc/nsswitch.conf has to be modified to let the system know we want it to use DNS before looking up hostnames in local files. Check the hosts line, it should look like this:

hosts:      dns files

YP/NIS

To activate YP at boottime the yp chkconfig flag has to be set to on:

chkconfig yp on

In addition it is required to set the YP domainname in /var/yp/ypdomain. That's all and the server should contact the YP server when booted.

To tell the system it should get additional passwd and group via YP the following files have to be altered. Append the following to /etc/passwd:

+::::::

And add to /etc/group this line:

+:::

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,hard,intr,bg 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

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