On Mon, Oct 30, 2000 at 08:07:32AM -0500, Greg Troxel wrote:
> 
>   /usr/local/coda/sbin/venus -h w.x.y.z -r s.root 
> 
> using a numeric address for the host.  You might also check dns and
> /etc/hosts and make sure that name resolution is working 100% ok.
> 
> I find that I need to do this to start venus while disconnected from
> the network.  This is important on a notebook, where I want to be able
> to get at files in coda even if I boot while remote.  (But really, the

This is because once you are disconnected and try to start venus, it is
not possible to resolve the names of the coda-servers as listed in
/etc/coda/venus.conf to their ip-addresses. And as there is nothing that
would retry this resolution at a later time, the Coda client would never
reconnect to any of the servers when started this way.

That's why a client is made to die when it is unable to resolve any of
the Coda servers. There are 3 solutions,

1) venus -h ip.of.server.trick.
2) use numeric addresses in /etc/coda/venus.conf.
3) add the rootservers to /etc/hosts.

Option 3 is probably the most reliable one.

This ofcourse only helps the `restart-disconnected' case when the client
already has contacted the servers and figured out the rootvolume name
and got a copy of the /coda fs object in it's cache.

Find servers on startup problems are almost invariably a result of
missing entries in /etc/services, broken name resolution, or
occasionally operator error (oops, forgot to plug in the network cable).

Jan