[rescue] Silly NetBSD question

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Monday, November 19, 2001 at 10:37:14 (-0500), Joshua D Boyd wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: [rescue] Silly NetBSD question
>
> OK.  That fixed it.  So, I guess this system is stupid about whitespace.  Oh 
> well.

The comma is the subfield separator.  Everything else is a part of the userid.

Of course a username proper must not start with whitespace, so in this
case the whitespace could be allowed, but I think even suggesting this
to *BSD developers would be going against over 30 years of tradition and
history, and might not be taken so well!  ;-)

BTW, I missed your mention of not being able to read the manual pages.
That's kinda weird.  I wouldn't expect any problems, not even with the
most primitive terminal emulator.  The manual pages are all
pre-formatted to print on a line printer.  Programs such as less and
more know how to interpret line-printer codes to add bold, underline,
etc. on your terminal, provided of course that you've told them to use a
terminal type that reasonably matches the capabilities of your terminal
or emulator (i.e. set TERM correctly in the environment), and if you're
using an emulator provided that it isn't too buggy.

>   Once I get a bit farther with
> this machine, I plan to load SunOS4 or NetBSD on an IPX to use as a 
> boot/DNS/dhcp server.

At this point I wouldn't touch SunOS-4 with a 100-foot pole, or even a
1000-ft pole, especially not for anything even vaguely related to
production work, and never on anything even remotely reachable from the
public Internet.

NetBSD can run almost all SunOS-4 applications (except system-related
ones, such as those needing special drivers, eg. the X.25 stuff, some
other odd-ball adapters, and so on).

For just DNS, dhcp, etc., NetBSD is ready-to-use with no add-on software
required.  I've been running 1.3.2 for these purposes on my SS2 server
and I've never had any problems with it (well, 1.3.x has an rarpd bug
that makes me have to restart it sometimes if I have to reboot my SS1+
workstation, but that's not a big deal, and I've upgraded named several
times, and installed smail instead of sendmail of course).

>  I'm trying to set up these two boxes to take over for 
> a win98 box running Windows Internet Connection Sharing.

NetBSD comes with IP Filter, which can work as a NAT/PAT.

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

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