Name Services and AnswerBook2

In the Solaris environment, the primary name services are:

• NIS+ (Network Information Service Plus)

  NIS+ is the primary name service used for Solaris 2.6 and is a redesigned version of NIS that takes into account recent changes in client/server environments. NIS+ was introduced in the SunOS 5.0 (Solaris 2.0) release. If your system is using NIS+, you can run ab2regsvr on the document server system. It creates an entry like this: thisorgunit/service/answerbook2.

• NIS (Network Information Service)

  NIS was the standard name service provided in SunOS 4.x (Solaris 1.x) environments. If your system is using NIS, you must contact your NIS administrator and have that person run ab2regsvr on the NIS master system to set up the name space for AnswerBook2 servers.

• File System

  If a user chooses not to run either NIS or NIS+, the AnswerBook2 product also works with a file-system defined naming system in which all names are manually entered into data files. In this instance, these files would be stored in the directory /var/fn. The server would need to export this directory and any clients that wanted to access documents on this server would need to mount this directory.

Rather than using the described name services to find a document server, the user can define a default AnswerBook2 server using the environment variable AB2_DEFAULTSERVER. For example, the user could have the following line in the .cshrc file:

setenv AB2_DEFAULTSERVER http://imayoyo.eng.sun.com:8888

If the user has not defined an environment variable, when the user launches AnswerBook2 from the desktop, the system performs an fnlookup thisorgunit/service/answerbook2 command to find out what document servers are available. It then chooses one of those servers and launches the AnswerBook2 browser using that server name for the URL.