*BSD News Article 65767


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From: j@ida.interface-business.de (J Wunsch)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc,comp.unix.admin
Subject: Re: Tape backup across systems
Date: 12 Apr 1996 13:00:55 GMT
Organization: interface business GmbH, Dresden
Lines: 31
Message-ID: <4klk67$m45@innocence.interface-business.de>
References: <3169DFA6.2295@pgh.net> <4kcpmf$g74@mark.ucdavis.edu> <tgilbert-1104961600330001@abq130-160.abq.bdm.com>
Reply-To: joerg_wunsch@interface-business.de (Joerg Wunsch)
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Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc:3149 comp.unix.admin:40597

tgilbert@news.abq.bdm.com (Todd Gilbert) writes:

> > Oh--I seem to remember a glitch where the "rmt" program needs
> > to have a link from /etc--has this been fixed?  If not, you will
> > need to do something like "ln -s /usr/sbin/rmt /etc".
> 
> I haven't seen this on any of the machines I administer (SGI,
> SunOS, Solaris, AIX)

It's a 4.4BSD bogon.  4.4BSD decided to clean up the file system, and
move sysadmin binaries out of /etc.  That's right.  However, they've
botched the ``rmt protocol'', in that the only existing convention for
the location of rmt(8) was /etc/rmt.

The symlink part is easy.  4.4BSD did even worse in that their [r]dump
and [r]restore commands simply removed the "/etc/" from the pathname
of the (remotely) invoked program.  Now, they rely on the path being
set correctly.  This is often not the case, and to the worst, for
Bourne-alike shells, there's no method to suck any configuration file
when being invoked via a remote shell.  (For C-alike shells, root's
cshrc can help around it.)

For FreeBSD, we've reverted these mistakes.  The symlink for /etc/rmt
is now installed by default, and dump/restore use /etc/rmt again, as
do all the other existing programs (on all other systems) that invoke
rmt(8), including e.g. GNU tar, IRIX tar etc.

-- 
J"org Wunsch					       Unix support engineer
joerg_wunsch@interface-business.de       http://www.interface-business.de/~j