[TUHS] Directory services in early Unix networks?

[Clem Cole]

And I left out the whole X.500 DAP which begat ??UMich's I think? LDAP -
which was mid to late 1980s.
ᐧ

On Wed, Nov 7, 2018 at 10:02 AM Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Mon, Nov 5, 2018 at 7:35 PM Dan Cross <crossd at 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
> ᐧ
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20181107/3390d227/attachment.html>