Termcap, printcap, and remotes in Yellow Pages

[Stan Switzer]

Has anyone ever tried to use the yellow pages to serve termcap, printcap,
or remotes entries?  It seems like an obvious enough idea.  It'd be simple
enough to do for /etc/termcap, and it'd be a lot nicer scheme than System
V's unspeakable arrangement.

With /etc/printcap a problem arises: you need to be able to somehow tailor
the file a little bit for each of the print servers.  What'd probably work
is to have entries with names "printer at sys" override entries "printer" on
system "sys".  The default entry "printer" would be a remote entry, and
the overrides would specify the particulars for the servers.

A less complicated scheme would involve having servers specify their
overrides in their local printcap files followed by a "+" entry to pull in
the common (remote) entries from the yellow pages.

Of course, then you'd probably want to think about fixing the print
spooler so that remote prints at diskless workstations don't end up flying
over the net three times.  But that's a whole 'nuther issue.

The way some of these things work you'd thing all anyone ever did with
Suns is run "shelltool rlogin <foo>."  It's going to take some INTEGRATION
to make the network BE the computer.

Stan Switzer  sjs at ctt.bellcore.com