trAvis - MANAGER

Edit File: README.IRIX

@(#) README.IRIX 1.2 94/12/28 18:45:58 In the past few months I received several messages with questions from people that tried to use my tcp wrapper on IRIX 5.x. Some mysteries could be solved via email, and then some remained. Today I finally had a chance to do some tests on someones IRIX 5.2 system. Here is my first-hand experience with wrapper release 6.3. (1) Inetd is broken. Normally one edits inetd.conf, sends a HUP signal to inetd and that's it. With IRIX evil things happen: inetd is too stupid to remember that it is already listening on a port. In order to modify an entry in inetd.conf, first comment it out with a # at the beginning of the line, kill -HUP the inetd, then uncomment the inetd.conf entry and kill -HUP again. Even with this amount of care I have seen inetd messing up, like calling rusersd when I make a talk connection. Even killing and restarting inetd does not solve all problems. I find it hard to believe, it but the best thing to do with IRIX is to reboot after changing inetd.conf. (2) When tcpd is built according to the irix4 Makefile rules, it appears to work as expected with TCP-based services such as fingerd, and with UDP-based services such as ntalk and tftp. (3) It does NOT work with RPC over UDP services such as rusersd and rstatd: the wrapper hangs in the recvfrom() system call, and I have spent several hours looking for ways to work around it. No way. After finding that none of the applicable socket primitives can be made to work (recvfrom recvmsg) I give up. So, the IRIX RPC services cannot be wrapped until SGI fixes their system so that it works like everyone elses code (HP Sun Dec AIX and so on). (4) I didn't even bother to try the RPC over TCP services. (5) When an IRIX 5.2 system is a NIS client, it can have problems with hosts that have more than one address: the wrapper will see only one address, and may complain when PARANOID mode is on. The fix is to change the name service lookup order in /etc/resolv.conf so that your system tries DNS before NIS (hostresorder bind nis local). (6) IRIX 5.2 is not System V.4, and it shows. Do not link with the -lsocket and -lnsl libraries. They are completely broken, and the wrapper will be unable to figure out the client internet address. So, TLI services cannot be wrapped until SGI fixes their system so that it works the way it is supposed to. I am not impressed by the quality of the IRIX system software. There are many things that work on almost every other system except with IRIX. Wietse