On Mon, Nov 5, 2018 at 7:35 PM Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com> wrote:
Spurred by the recent discussion of NIS, NIS+, LDAP et al, I'm curious what the landscape was like for distributing administrative information in early Unix networks.

Specifically I'm thinking about things like the Newcastle Connection, etc.

I imagine that PDP-11's connected to the ARPAnet running Unix would (e.g., RFC 681 style) would have adapted the HOSTS.TXT format somehow. What about CHAOS? Newcastle? Datakit?

What was the introduction of DNS into the mix like? I can imagine that that changed all sorts of assumptions about failure modes and the like.

NIS and playing around with Hesiod are probably the earliest such things I ever saw, but I know there must have been prior art.

Supposedly field 5 from /etc/passwd is the GECOS username for remote job entry (or printing)? How did that work?

Dan - all good questions, but I think you are mixing a few things (which is easy to do as they all had different evolutionary paths).

  • ARPAnet was Rand, UCLA and UofI in the early to mid 70s.
  • UCLA line would fork competely with the original Locus work of the mid 70's, which would reappear later in the 80's post BSD
  • IP Networking was done by BBN for 4.1BSD in the late 70s - originally as an OS independant stack (hence it has its own memory manager to insulated it from the local S).  Besides UNIX I think it went into HP's MPE and maybe a couple f other systems.
  • The BBN IP stack was then repliced into UNIX by UCB/CRSG as 4.1A with Joy's sockets layer in 82/83
  • HOST.TXT was finaly abandoned and BIND was then done (primarily at UCB by peed on by many) - I want to say eary 80's  the SCCS files might give you some hints.
  • Hesiod was MIT/Athenia and NIS by Sun were  later developed somewhat in the same time frame   (mid to late 80s)
  • CHAOS was completely seperate, although influenced the BBN code and was the early/mid 70s.
  • BTL's DataKit of course, had the UoI (Chesson) influence was late 70s.
  • Best I can tell Newcastle was complete seperate from all of this (also late 70s).

Clem
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