Well this is more of a warning for those using NIS+. I just installed the 4.75 tarball for glibc 2.1. What happened: Netscape crashes on every attempt to check uid or user name. This as been some sort of a chronical disease on netscape. Both netscape's, glibc 2.0 & 2.1, don't work with NIS+ users. These builds either segfault either crash the machines. Yeah, that's right they CRASH a Linux box. The problem is due to the fact that, under certain environment conditions, netscape starts bombing the system by looping several NIS+ calls and not getting with the returns. What solutions may exist? First use libc5 build. It works but it needs some checkups on netscape configs. Right now I don't remember exactly the origin of the feature, but under certain settings, netscape can't send mail. It always opens the 25 port, it does everything to send the mail till the crucial moment of sending the magical ".". At that point it makes a check for uid/username (WHY?). However, if some preferences are on, the thing ignores nis+ and makes a direct read to /etc/passwd, which naturally fails. Second solution. To use netscape without static Motif (netscape-dynMotif of the tarballs). Until now I could only test it with Lesstif libs (I couldn't check OpenMotif until now). Under them, netscape loves to cry wild about several stuff missing. Well, personally I didn't note anything seriously missing. Everything seems to draw more or less well. The only hassle is that a cascade of dialog windows cry about something missing. And it segfaults sometimes Experts may ask. What a interface library has to do with authentication???? You may laugh but netscape-dynMotif works. Traces are a little more harder to do there (we used strace & ltrace) but all processes of getting/sending mail seem to work without a hassle. Besides. I am not the discoverer of this stuff. As far as I know, a year before us (1998) many sysadmins/developers had already noted this situation. And several wrote directly to netscape. Our team here wrote three times, even in bigger detail about this problem. However, since 4.51, this problem stands and it seems that netscape team doesn't make a whistle about it. Well so why this so-long letter? First a warning to all developers/sysadmins/users using NIS+. Second I'm trying to base the problem as many people may not understand how tricky it is (the reasons came out after long hours of tracing the code). Third a requirement. Netscape will probably still stay for a while. So my two duty-free questions: Can you add netscape libc5 build as a add-on? In contribs for example. I would do it if someone clarifies how bureaucracy works and there is some interest on it. Is anyone thinking about using netscape-dynMotif in the future? Has anyone tested ow it works with Lesstif/OpenMotif? Ektanoor
