On Tue, 2008-07-08 at 11:15 +0100, Mark Brown wrote: > Note that this can't be enabled by default on upgrades since doing > that may break existing installations by overwriting existing > configuration. It also needs to be optional for new installations for > similar reasons, probably doing something similar to what the samba > package does for WINS.
I'm not sure whether it's better to discuss this in bug comments since the discussion is then easily tied to the request. I added a note there saying I'm not so sure about this. All other distros I'm familiar with contain a dhclient-script that handles this automatically and it's enabled by default (on Red Hat for example you can disable it by adding NISPEERS=no or similar to something in /etc/sysconfig). In order for overwriting to occur, the following must be true: the user must have installed the NIS package (it's not installed by default on Ubuntu), and the user must use DHCP for their network settings, and the DHCP server must be configured to provide nis-domain and nis-server settings as options (this is rare since only larger enterprises with lots of UNIX systems bother with NIS), and finally the user must, for some reason, want to use a different value for either/or the NIS domain and the NIS servers than the one the DHCP admin suggested. Those are a lot of "ifs" and I really don't believe they justify a lot of complicated configuration and potentially confusing questions on install. I don't have any problem with a way to disable it if the user wants to (a setting in /etc/defaults/nis maybe? Or maybe they just remove these entries from the dhclient.conf request? There is a change in behavior, potentially, but Ubuntu changes behaviors every release. Finally, remember that the dhclient exit hook preserves the user's setup when the lease is obtained and restores it when it is released. Typically the replacement configuration (in this case the /etc/yp.conf file) has a comment saying it was replaced by the dhclient script based on DHCP server settings, so users will know what happened. > For this to be fully useful there would also need to some facility for > adding the NIS entries to the passwd, group and shadow files during > installation. This is outside the scope of the NIS package since it > affects the global configuration of the system. I don't think any change is needed here. The base system nsswitch.conf uses "compat" for the passwd, group, and shadow entries which is fine. All I've had to do to get my Ubuntu systems to be on par with my Red Hat Enterprise systems (in this respect) is add the dhclient exit hook and the dhclient.conf entries, and it works well. -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss