[TUHS] Directory services in early Unix networks?

[Henry Bent]

On Wed, 7 Nov 2018 at 14:57, Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> This doesn't mesh with my memory. I recall building BIND from source and
> having to rebuild network programs (e.g. on 4.3 on the RT or VAXen) to pick
> up the new version of libresolv.a, and hacking the resolver library into
> libc.so on Suns. I remember using resolv.conf fairly early on, but my
> memory is that nsswitch.conf came later (Solaris 2.x era?). Ultrix did have
> a configuration file for where to do host lookups, but I think the set of
> sources was fixed: files, NIS or DNS. This would have been in the Ultrix
> 4.4 or 4.5 era on MIPS. I remember seeing some description of a
> configuration file accompanied by an editorialized comment saying something
> like, "this is an idea that's time has come: Ultrix has had it for several
> years." The dig on uglix was, well, kind of funny (I had a DECstation at
> home at the time).
>

Ultrix 4.0 (1990) had /etc/svc.conf for controlling distributed service
lookups, and you are correct that the only options were local, yp, and
bind.  Ultrix 3 (1988) had /etc/svcorder which was much more limited, only
allowing for setting the order of host lookups, but it did have support for
resolv.conf and BIND lookups (which still works!).

-Henry
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