Original Question:
>
>Does anyone have any ideas why users cannot login (via telnet) unless there
>is a entry in the /etc/hosts file with their IP address? They are
>attempting to login to a SparcServer1000 running Solaris 2.4. They appear
>to connect, but never get a login prompt. We have 2 Sparc20s running
>Solaris 2.4 that do not exhibit this behavior.
>
>I have tried the man pages and the FAQ to no avail. I have also tried
>putting only the network part of the IP address (subnet) in the file - no luck.
>
>At one point the 1000 machine was an NIS client (running Solaris 2.3). It is
>currently not running NIS, NIS+, or DNS.
>
>I'm sure the answer is pretty simple, but I have not been able to find any
>info on it. I've had to hardcode IP addresses in a few PC's (they normally
>get them from DHCP) just so they can be referenced in the /etc/hosts file
>for telnet. For other users, I have them telnet to one of the Sparc20s and
>then to the 1000. I'd like to tidy this up if possible.
>
>Thanks for any help.
>
>Dan Freedman
>
>
The winning suggestion was made by ... Casper Dik <casper@holland.Sun.COM>
who said to check my nsswitch.conf file. Sure enough: my line read
hosts: nis [NOTFOUND=return] files dns
I switched it to :
hosts: files nis [NOTFOUND=return] dns
This seems to fix the problem. Surprisingly about 5 or 6 responses felt
that you had to have a line in the /etc/hosts file or be runnning DNS, NIS,
or NIS+ in order to use telnet. For incoming telnets this is definitely not
the case. For outgoing, it seems you only need (hosts,nis,dns,nis+) if you
want to use a logical name instead of the actual IP address.
I should have caught the problem. This is the 2nd time I've been bitten by
that dadgum nsswitch.conf file! Thanks for the responses.
Dan Freedman
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:11:47 CDT