Question about ftp and NIS (YP)

[Russell J Fulton;ccc032u]

I am about to put up a patched version of ftpd on our system. I was testing
it on a workstation when I noticed that I could not log on to it using
my normal login. The workstation is diskless and uses NIS to access the
password file from the main system. I relinked ftpd with -lsun to get the
NIS aware versions of getpwent etc and all worked fine.

I then checked the distributed versions of ftpd to see if they were NIS aware
(this is Irix 3.3.2) and found that it was not. I then tried to ftp to a 
SUN (SUNOS 4.1.1) that also shares the main password file by NIS with the
same result.

My question is this: Is there some special reason why SGI and SUN both 
distribute their ftpds so that only people with entries in the local
/etc/passwd file can get access to the system via ftp? Or to put it another
way is there some good reason for me not to link my version -lsun.

Thanks, Russell.

-- 
Russell Fulton, Computer Center, University of Auckland, New Zealand.
<rj_fulton at aukuni.ac.nz>