UX400S: a decent machine

[Chris Lindblad <cjl%ai.mit.edu@RELAY.CS.NET>]

    Date: Sat, 20 Jan 90 01:03:06 EST
    From: barmar@Think.COM

       Date: Thu, 18 Jan 90 13:22 CST
       From: dmitchell@backus.trc.amoco.com (Donald H. Mitchell)

       One of my minor beefs about NFS and TCP/IP is that the Symbolics can't
       read or request the info from a Unix nameserver but has to have a
       Symbolics style namespace available.  Of course, I may have missed
       something.

    The Unix Yellow Pages database is missing much of the information that
    Genera wants.  It doesn't have anything equivalent to System Type, which is
    necessary if you want to access a host as a file server (the Lispm has to
    know the OS so that it knows the appropriate pathname syntax), or Services.

Actually, things aren't that bad.  The yellow pages database is extensible
enough to provide all namespace attributes.  You just create a yellow pages
map for each namespace attribute, and use the hosts.byname map to just get
internet addresses.  For example, system type could be found in a
host-system-type.byname map.  If a host isn't found in a map, then defaults
for that attribute could be used.

Of course, it would be a nightmare maintaining all those Yellow Pages maps.
Sun has not provided any support in the protocol for updating the Yellow Pages
from the network, so they would all have to be maintained by dbm files.