Termcap, printcap, and remotes in Yellow Pages

[Roy Smith]

In v7, i37, msg 12/12, sjs at ctt.bellcore.com (Stan Switzer) writes:
> Has anyone ever tried to use the yellow pages to serve termcap, printcap,
> or remotes entries?

We put printcap into our yp maps a while ago.  I'm actually rather
surprised that Sun doesn't do that by default.  We have the local copies
of /etc/printcaps get searched first, then the YP printcap map.  That way,
all we need do is put an entry for each remote printer in the YP map and
on the particular machines where the printers actually reside, put a local
entry for that same printer in the local /etc/printcap.  Got that?

One of the nice things about this is it becomes easy to redirect printer
output if a particular printer is down for a while.  For example, laser9
is plugged into /dev/ttya on adenine.  In the YP map, we have:

	laser9:lp=:rp=laser9:rm=adenine:

while in adeine's /etc/printcap we have:

	laser9:lp=/dev/ttya:

If for some reason laser9 is going to be down for a day or so, all I need
do is change adenine's /etc/printcap to read:

	laser9:lp=:rp=laser10:rm=phrivax:

and not bother changing the YP map.  More important, I don't have to
remember to change the YP map again when laser9 comes back up.  Of course,
that means every print job for laser9 will get sent to adenine and then
turned around and get sent to phrivax to be queued on laser10, but we feel
that the administrative convenience outweighs the extra network traffic
(what difference does another few Mbytes a day make to an ethernet?)  In
fact, it doesn't even matter if we get the right machine in the "rm="
slot; if I happen to pick the wrong machine by mistake, it just means
another hop across the network.  Of course, if you expect the outage to
last for any appreciable amount of time you will want to make the change
directly in the YP map to avoid the extra hops.

I didn't do the code changes; it was all done by Nomi Voroba, who no
longer works here (Hi Nomi!).  To tell you the truth, I havn't looked at
the code much, so I don't know what kind of state it is in.  I suspect
that much of it is based on Sun-proprietary source, so we probably can't
send it out.  If I remember, I'll see about getting it all packaged up for
export and then see if I can get Sun licensing to give me the go-ahead to
post it.  Lacking that, I could probaby just post the diffs.

Roy Smith, System Administrator
Public Health Research Institute
{allegra,philabs,cmcl2,rutgers}!phri!roy -or- phri!roy at uunet.uu.net