On Wed, Mar 24, 2004 at 08:38:21AM +0000, paul.rogers_at_mowlem.com wrote:
> We have a peculiar setup where all our machines run Windows except our
> web serveres that run LInux.  This means we do not run DNS (we use
> wins instead).  Therefore I have done the following to resolve names.
> 
> 1) Hosts - includes a line for each server & client ie
> 192.168.0.1 edm_bfhxx_wb001 edm_bfhxx_wb001.edm.mowlem.com
> 
> 2) venus.conf - includes realm = edm.mowlem.com

This entry isn't used by venus itself. It just provides a default
realmname for a couple of programs such as clog, so that you can do
'clog codaroot' instead of 'clog codaroot_at_edm.mowlem.com'.

One thing is that 6.0.3 actually appends a '.' to the realm name before
passing it to the resolver, to prevent domain name expansion.

However this didn't always work right when libresolv is using
/etc/hosts, possibly this depends on the specific implementation in
libc or it really never worked at all and I got fooled by a locally
running DNS cache. This has been fixed in 6.0.5 though.

> I can start venus and then use clog codaroot and this connects.
> However if I then do ls -l /coda/edm.mowlem.com/ I get the following:
> 
> lrw-r--r--    1 root     nfsnobod       17 Mar 23 08:58 coda/edm.mowlem.com -> #@edm.mowlem.com
> 
> with the link itself highlighted in red.  Trying to cd to the
> directory gives a no such file or directory.

That would typically indicate that either the resolution failed, or it
couldn't reach the server. I'm not sure how verbose the messages are,
but /usr/coda/etc/console (or /var/log/coda/venus.err) should contain
the message "Resolved realm 'edm.mowlem.com'" when it successfully
mapped the name to an IP-address. If that message is there the problem
is reaching the server. When the message is not there it should be a
name resolution problem.

Jan