PNP.SYSNAMES(5)

NAME
pnp.sysnames - file used to allocate system names

SYNOPSIS
/etc/pnp.sysnames

AVAILABILITY

Available only on Sun 386i systems running a SunOS 4.0.x release or earlier. Not a SunOS 4.1 release feature.

DESCRIPTION

The /etc/pnp.sysnames file contains system names that may be allocated on demand, typically as part of Automatic System Installation.

The system names should be legal system names, one per line. Legal names are up to 31 characters long, and consist of lowercase alphanumeric characters, dashes, and underscores. The first character must be alphabetic, and the last character should be alphanumeric. Blank lines are allowed in the file, but comments are not.

When a system name needs to be allocated, the first unused system name is taken from /etc/pnp.sysnames. If all the system names there are in use, unused names are allocated from the list system-1, system-2, ...; the default prefix system may be changed in the /var/yp/updaters makefile. A system name is “used” if there is already a matching entry in the Network Information Service (NIS) hosts.byname map, the ethers.byname map, or there is a netgroup with that name. Names are allocated to correspond to a given Ethernet address. There is no concept of “transient” name allocation; part of allocating a system name includes updating the ethers.byname and ethers.byaddr NIS maps to persistently associate the name with that Ethernet address.

One way to allocate a system name is to issue a ypupdate(3N) call to update the ethers.byaddr map. The key is the Ethernet address (or general IEEE 802.2 48 bit address, used also with FDDI and Token Ring standards) of the system whose name is being allocated. The data is a line formatted according to the format specified in ethers(5). A name is allocated if the name passed is `*' (a single asterisk). Updating this NIS map using ypupdate(3N) is a privileged operation, and may be performed only by users in the networks group (with group ID 12), or boot servers (listed in the ypservers NIS map).

FILES
/etc/pnp.sysnames
/usr/etc/yp/upd.systems
/var/yp/updaters

SEE ALSO
ypupdate(3N), ethers(5), group(5), hosts(5), netgroup(5), updaters(5), pnpd(8C)

NOTES
The Network Information Service (NIS) was formerly known as Sun Yellow Pages (YP). The functionality of the two remains the same; only the name has changed.