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From: thompson%pan@UMIX.CC.UMICH.EDU (John Thompson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo
Subject: re: Problems with email
Message-ID: <9007102304.AA20693@pan.ssec.honeywell.com>
Date: 10 Jul 90 23:04:27 GMT
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Organization: The Internet
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Jinfu Chen writes:
> In article <1664@tuvie> mike@tuvie (Inst.f.Techn.Informatik) writes:
> > I'm not sure whether this is a bug or a feature (on Apollos you never
> > quite know :-(, but here comes my problem:
> >
> > Our mail works OK as long as the registry is available, but
> > when the registry is down (we do not have slave registries), then 
> > /bsd4.3/bin/mail will not deliver mail to the recipients. Now the 
> > problem seems to be that the mailer cannot acquire the gid of mail, 
> > but about this I'm not too sure.
> 
> I believe calls in <pwd.h> are eventually translated to registry calls, and
> /etc/passwd, /etc/group, etc aren't just plain unstruct file either. The
> only solusion is to have slave registry running somewhere else.

True.  From the man page for getpwuid, it says:

     Under Domain/OS BSD, /etc/passwd is a read-only object of the type
     "passwd," maintained by the registry server.  See rgyd(8).  The presence
     of the registry server affects the implementation of these interfaces in
     the following way.

     If there was no call to setpwfile, these interfaces call the registry
     server.  If this call fails, they search the local registry.

     If there was a call to setpwfile, these interfaces search name.  They
     access name by way of its type manager.  If name is of type "passwd" (as
     in the case of /etc/passwd), its manager will cause the interface to call
     the registry server.  If, in this case, the call to the registry server
     fails, the local registry will not be searched.  name remains in effect
     until the next call to setpwfile or the process fails.

Notice that, in all cases except one where you define your own password file
to access, it goes into the registry services (rgyd).  In my opinion, you're
asking for trouble when you only have one rgyd running.  We have 6, for
sixty nodes.  That's a little TOO redundant, except that several of them are
acting as safety nets for when we split the ring (not an infrequent occurance).

John Thompson
Honeywell, SSEC
Plymouth MN  55441

thompson@pan.ssec.honeywell.com

My opinions are my own;  my beliefs are my own;  my soul belongs to Honeywell.