Date: Wed, 15 Jan 1997 09:51:27 -0600 (CST) From: Phil Gilley <pgilley@metronet.com> To: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Netscape and NIS Message-ID: <Pine.HPP.3.95.970115094756.26411A-100000@fohnix.metronet.com>
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I have a network of around 40 Pentium/FreeBSD 2.1.5 PCs and 10 or so SPARC/Solaris 2.5 workstations. Home directories on both systems are NFS automounted from a Solaris server and password information is handled by a FreeBSD NIS server. Netscape is used for sending and receiving mail via POP. Everything is working fine except for Netscape on the FreeBSD PCs which gives a "Netscape is out of memory" error when you try to send mail. I searched the FreeBSD mail archives and saw a few other people reporting the same problem but didn't see any solutions. I had been assuming this was an NFS file locking problem but with some help from David Greenman I was able to determine it is actually an NIS related problem. When you send mail, Netscape opens /etc/pwd.db and searches through it. Since it can't find any user account information (because it's in the NIS database not the local password database) Netscape assumes there's some sort of error. As I understand things, Netscape uses an old version of BSDI for their development and old versions of BSDI didn't support NIS so Netscape doesn't know how to handle it. My solution, since most of my users only do mail from the machine on their desk, is to add an account for them in the local password database on that machine. (Of course their local account is identical to their NIS account.) If they need to do mail from another machine they can just run Netscape for Solaris on one of the SPARCs and point the display back to whatever machine they're on (which is what they have to do now). My solution isn't great but it does allow everyone to run Netscape locally which helps the SPARCs do what they need to do which is run Solaris specific applications. Users do have to deal with two passwords which can be confusing, but a message in /etc/motd helps remind them what's going on. I've posted this for several reasons. First, as a sanity check to make sure I'm not completely off base here. Also to document a possible solution for others who have this problem. And finally to help plead the case for a native FreeBSD version of Netscape. Phil Gilley pgilley@metronet.com
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