Sun

Does anyone know of any good sources of documentation for SunOS 4.1.4? I recently installed it on my SS20 after finding some good installation docs on the web. Unfortunately I can't find any post-installation administration guides anywhere.

I'd really like to play around with SunOS 4.1.4 (and possibly Solaris 2.x) on this machine because that's where I got my introduction to Unix. I can't quite remember what the machines were running back then but it was in the SunOS 4.1.4 to Solaris 2.3 timeframe according to Wikipedia's Solaris version history chart. Back then I was merely a (novice) user on a system run by the professional sysadmins at my university. So at the time I knew very little about using the system and even less about administration. Unfortunately, I still know very little about being sysadmin on SunOS!

So far it boots fine, I can login, and I can launch SunView and OpenWindows. It's almost connected to the rest of my network...it just won't talk to my DNS server. (But pinging by IP address is fine and routing is properly configured.) AFAICT I've got /etc/resolv.conf and /etc/nsswitch.conf setup correctly according to their respective man pages, but DNS queries fail. An admin guide would likely point me in the right direction to fix that and answer future questions, too.

Any suggestions on where to find a book, PDF, or website for sysadmins of such an old operating system? Thanks!

SunOS 4 will not perform DNS lookups by default. It was built at a time where Sun was pushing YP very hard, and it expects to get hostname resolution through the YP server. The YP server had a `-d' flag to allow it to perform DNS lookups for hostnames not found in the YP database.

Therefore the preferred way to setup a SunOS 4 system is to make it part of an YP network; in your case, simply setting up an YP server on the system, and making it an YP client of itself (i.e. running both ypserv -d and ypbind on the system) ought to do the trick.

If you want to avoid setting up an YP server, Sun had a procedure to enable DNS lookups in the resolver. I don't remember the details, but it involved recompiling (well, really relinking with a few different object files) the libc, which became a problem when some y2k patches caused conflicts with this procedure.

Also, note that /etc/nsswitch.conf is a Solaris thing, it has no effect on a SunOS 4 system.

Interesting. I was not aware of that. It certainly explains why I can get anywhere by IP address but not by name.

Since it came with an early version of named and the resolv.conf man page on the box talks about DNS servers, I assumed that meant it would do DNS lookups. (That, and it's the only Unix-y system I've encountered that didn't do DNS....)

I did get named configured and now nslookup works on the machine. Still can't ping by name. But at least it's a step in the right direction.

I'll definitely look into YP as you suggest.


I see. I must have been reading the wrong documentation when it told me to verify nsswitch.conf was correctly configured. Oops. Too many projects on the go, perhaps!

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction!

Still looking for good documentation if anyone knows of good books....

it has named and resolv.conf, but the provided gethostby library routines do not make use of them. just NIS... which is why there's the -d flag for ypserv.

you can build sendmail and explicitly link it against the DNS resolver library, and it will do DNS lookups all day long, and so will nslookup (even without you doing anything). but neither of these facts change that (for example) ping is not linked against the DNS resolver, and so will never work this way. The only way to get DNS resolution "fully functioning" on SunOS 4.1.4 is with ypserv -d.

It is possible to teach SunOS to use DNS, but generally requires some "open heart surgery".
One way is resolve+. The other way is using bind4. Both options include patching the SunOS libc.
If you are running 4.1.4 you might want to install official Sun patches too, because Sun released Y2K for 4.1.4.

Yep, 4.1.4 is probably the way to go. 4.1.3_U1B also has Y2k patches, but Oracle pulled access to both of them the last time I checked (well, not Oracle - it was the immediately pre-Oracle Sun).

I have the 4.1.4 and 4.1.3_U1B AnswerBook CDs. Another SunOS reference I use is The System Administrator's Guide to the Sun Workstations and the Unix Admin Red-book, but neither of these are electronic or out-of-copyright.

Aha! That first one sounds like somethng I should look into. Another source also mentioned the "Red" book and now that you've recommended it too, I'll look into it some more. It looks like both books are available cheaply from an on-line used book store here in Canada. Even better!

I've also been able to locate some on-line docs too. In particular, Chapter 30 of this on-line book has a lot of what I was looking for. (The rest of the book should be at least somewhat helpful, too.) And another member here has helpfully reminded me via PM that the Unix Rosetta Stone has a SunOS 4 column.

Thanks all!

The first book is written in the SunOS 4.0.3 era, but most of the concepts are valid through to the end of SunOS4.

If you get the red book make sure it is the red book (second edition). The later "Purple Book" is much reduced in the variants of UNIX it covers.

Aeleen Frisch's Essential Unix Administration is another good one, but I pick it up less than the red book.