FTP problem on 3/60's

[Jason Heirtzler]

felix!arcturus!dav at hplabs.hp.com (David L. Markowitz) says:
>The symptom is that when FTP'ing FROM any 3/60 TO anywhere (including
>itself), FTP is unable to bind any sockets.  It fails with a "Can't assign
>requested address" error.  FTP thus cannot do an "ls", "send" or "get", or
>any other operation requiring data transfer.  "cd" succeeds.

This has happened often enough to me that I ought to mention it.

If your client's *own* /etc/hosts has an incorrect address for it's yp
server, things break with "bind: can't assign requested address," which is
confusing, since in all other respects the yp seems okay.

The first time it happened to me ( okay, it happened several times.. ) I
was trying to use vt100tool. This is SunOS 3.x, but probably 4.x also.

The next question is why it even works in the first place, under these
circumstances. The mind boggles.

---Jason Heirtzler
   Boston University
   jdh at bu-it.bu.edu