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Setting up SGI Irix 4.x systems for use on a particular LAN can be done in a variety of ways. The following are suggestions and hints of things to check. But these suggestions may not be the only way, or the best way, to set up your system to operate on the SUCCESS LAN at Salina. Consult your local SGI system expert for things that may be peculiar to your system.
IMPORTANT: Whenever making a change to a system file, always make a copy of the original version of the file that was working before you began reconfiguration for the SUCCESS LAN.
In the following suggestions and hints, assume that your assigned fully-qualified hostname for your machine on the Salina SUCCESS LAN is "myhost.success.espo.nasa.gov", and your assigned IP address is 198.120.56.25. Consult the table of assigned hostnames and IP addresses to find your actual unique values for these two items and use them. The other configuration parameters for the SUCCESS LAN are shared by all hosts. They are:
Netmask: 255.255.255.0
Broadcast IP address: 198.120.56.255
Gateway IP address: 198.120.56.1
DNS Nameserver hosts:
cloud4.success.espo.nasa.gov 198.120.56.130
cloud1.arc.nasa.gov 128.102.154.176
/etc/sys_id
Put your fully qualified SUCCESS LAN hostname in the /etc/sys_id file. E.g. the following single line would be in the /etc/sys_id file:
myhost.success.espo.nasa.gov
/etc/hosts
Minimally put your SUCCESS LAN hostname and its IP address in your /etc/hosts file. E.g.
198.120.56.25 myhost.success.espo.nasa.gov myhost loghost
Dynamic hostname to IP address lookup service
If dynamic hostname-to-IP-address lookup service using the Ames name servers is desired, it is probably easiest to point to a list of these servers using the /etc/resolv.conf file. E.g the following could be put into /etc/resolve.conf:
hostresorder bind local domain success.espo.nasa.gov nameserver 198.120.56.130 nameserver 128.102.154.176 nameserver 128.102.18.31
The first nameserver is cloud4.success.espo.nasa.gov, a machine that is expected to be operating on the SUCCESS LAN for fast nameserver access. The second nameserver is the machine cloud1.arc.nasa.gov at NASA Ames that is expected to maintain the latest hostname vs IP addresses for the SUCCESS LAN. The primary cloud1 machine at Ames will download its hostname vs IP address table to the secondary cloud4 machine on the Salina LAN. The 3rd nameserver entry is the machine mx.nsi.nasa.gov, a general nameserver at NASA Ames.
The hostresorder entry above will cause hostname lookups to be first attempted from the list of BIND nameservers whose IP addresses appear in the /etc/resolv.conf file as shown above. If that fails, the IP address for the given hostname will be looked up in your local /etc/hosts file.
You could also run the caching nameserver /usr/sbin/named, but it is probably simpler to not start named, and to directly use the nameservers in the list above. The first namesever at IP 198.120.56.130 is expected to be on the local LAN, so nameservice should be relatively fast.
Static hostname to IP address lookup service
If static hostname-to-IP-address lookup is to be used via the /etc/hosts file, ensure that the named daemon is not started at boot time. (E.g. put "off" into the /etc/config/named file.) Static hostname-to-IP-address lookup is handled in the usual way by placing IP-address vs hostname pairs in the /etc/hosts file. A sample list of local SUCCESS LAN unix /etc/hosts entries are on the SUCCESS web pages under the "computer network" link.
The following could be put into the /etc/resolve.conf file for static hostname to IP lookup:
hostresorder local domain success.espo.nasa.gov
/etc/config/ifconfig-*.options
Insert the following line in the /etc/config/ifconfig-*.options file for your ethernet interface (usually the /etc/config/ifconfig-1.options file) to define the netmask and broadcast addrees for the SUCCESS LAN.
The netmask is all 1 bits in the 1st 24 bits of the IP address, and all 0 bits in the last 8 bits of the IP address.
The broadcast address is our Class C 3 byte network address concatenated with a host part of all 1 bits in the 4th byte of the IP address, i.e 198.120.56.255.
netmask 255.255.255.0 broadcast 198.120.56.255
routed
Routing of packets to/from hosts not on the local LAN can be handled with the standard /usr/etc/routed daemon. This daemon can be turned on during boot time by having the following in the /etc/config/routed file:
on
The following option should be used in the /etc/config/routed.options file to prevent excessive amounts of broadcasting of route information by hosts on the LAN:
-q
Some systems also normally specify the -h option in addition to the -q option. Our default route on the SUCCESS LAN (for packets not going to another machine on the LAN) will be our local router gateway to the Internet. That router's IP address will be 198.120.56.1. The above routed command options should set things up to find this default address, and to suppress the unnecessary broadcast of each host's routing tables to all the other hosts on the LAN.
If you normally explicitly specify a default route with the /usr/etc/route command (usually in script /etc/inet.d/network), then this route should be our router at 198.120.56.1.
/etc/sendmail.cf
Set the local domain name for email to the one we are using for the SUCCESS LAN by finding the line within /etc/sendmail.cf that begins with "DD", and arrange to have that line be:
DDsuccess.espo.nasa.gov
Note, some sendmail.cf files call programs to define some of these macro values, and so the domain definition above may actually be defined elsewhere.
If you have a /etc/sendmail.cw file, it should contain your hostname on the SUCCESS LAN, e.g.:
myhost.success.espo.nasa.gov myhost
/etc/TIMEZONE
The SUCCESS LAN will be operating in the Midwest timezone. To have commands such as "date" and "ls -l" use local time, you can set the systemwide local time zone environment variable TZ by putting the following into the /etc/TIMEZONE file:
TZ=CST6CDT export TZ
Other things to check
If your machine is going to be a print server, &/or will be spooling to print queues on other machines using the Berkeley network printing system, check your /etc/hosts.lpd and /etc/printcap files to ensure they contain the appropriate names of machines on the LAN.
Some machines may have entries in their cron table or license manager software's database file(s) that are specific to the LAN on which they are operating. You may want to check these for proper setup on the Salina LAN.
webmaster@cloud1.arc.nasa.gov