Questions and Answers

Amy Rich

Q I'm a long-time Linux power user who's finally gotten frustrated enough to move to a Mac. There are lots of things that I love, but the use of NetInfo annoys me to no end because things are no longer stored in flat text files. In this particular case, I want to automount an SMB share from one of my machines to the Mac. I can't figure out how to do this under OS X. Can you give me a concrete example to follow?

A I'm guessing you want this to be automatic for everyone and not have to hit apple-k from the Finder when you want to do the mount. There are two basic ways you can set up automounting under NetInfo. You can use the NetInfo Manager to modify the database directly, or you can dump out the database to a flat file, modify it, then re-import the flat file. The former method will probably give you some insight to the reasons behind the modifications in the latter, so I'll cover that first.

In this example, the server, server is exporting an SMB share share to the username username and the password password to be mounted dynamically on the client under /Network/Servers/server/share.

To run the NetInfo manager:

open /Applications/Utilities/NetInfo Manager.app

2. Click on the /mounts entry and then click the New Folder icon in the upper left-hand corner of the window to create a new entry. Change the Value of the name Property to server:/share.

3. Now create properties under the new mount point by choosing New Property from the Directory menu. Change the Property to vfstype and the Value to url.

4. Create another property entry with the Property set to dir and the Value set to /Network/Servers.

5. Create another property entry with the Property as opts and the Value as net.

6. Click on the opts property and choose Insert Value from the Directory menu. Change the Value to:

url==smb://user:password@server/share

To make the same changes without going through the NetInfo Manager GUI, you'd use the tools nidump and niload:

1. If you have not been keeping the /etc/fstab file up to date as you've added other mount points, run the following command as root to append the current mount point entries to the end of /etc/fstab:

nidump fstab . >> /etc/fstab

server:/share /Network/Servers url \
  net,url==smb://user:password@server/share 0 0

3. Load the information back into the NetInfo database by running:

niload fstab . < /etc/fstab

After employing either one of these methods, your SMB share should automount when you cd into /Network/Servers/server/share.

If the share is not mounting, your local configuration might also require you to specify the SMB Workgroup in the URL line:

url==smb://user:password@workgroup/server/share

A This is pretty sparse information to go on since you don't describe your kernel configuration or what software you have installed. You don't supply any error messages or kernel trace information, either. I'd suggest looking through the freebsd-stable list at:

http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr-summary.cgi?query

As a shot in the dark, though, the issue might be hardware-related if the machines aren't component for component identical. To make sure all your hardware is compatible, see:

http://www.freebsd.org/releases/5.3R/hardware-i386.html

Some people have pointed out issues with drivers for various types of network cards. There're also people who've had issues with SMP and ipfilter. One specific pr is located at:

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=83220

Your issue could also be software related. You may have stumbled across a bad kernel option or a bug in the system code or a third-party application that has access to the kernel.

Q I have an SB2500 running Solaris 10 that recently changed subnets. I modified /etc/inet/hosts, /etc/inet/netmasks, and /etc/defaultrouter to reflect the new information, but the machine is still bringing up the old IP address. I must have missed changing it somewhere (I'm not very familiar with Solaris 10 yet). Could you provide some advice?

A Most likely your issue is that you didn't change /etc/inet/ipnodes, which lists IPv6 and IPv4 addresses. If this doesn't fix your issue, the best thing to do is run sys-unconfig and go through the machine identification procedure again when you reboot.

Q We're running Apache on a bunch of 280Rs, and we're seeing very heavy CPU usage on each of these boxes. Apache is a pain to try and truss because of the way it forks, so I'm looking for another diagnostic tool to figure out what the heck the kernel is doing. I can use vmstat or top to view the top-level idle/user/kernel/iowait statistics, but I'm looking for something a bit finer grained. Do you have any suggestions?

A If you're running a new enough version of the Solaris OS, you can use DTrace to drill down into the kernel in various ways. There's quite a bit of information on DTrace at:

http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/content/dtrace/

kstat -p cpu_stat
lockstat -kIW -D 20 sleep 60
mpstat 10 6

A I actually wrote a couple scripts quite a while ago that do this for me using sendmail access lists. The first script downloads the delegated IP lists from apnic and lacnic and scps them over to the mail server:

#!/usr/local/bin/perl

use Net::FTP;
use Net::SCP;
use File::Basename;
use Strict;
use Warnings;

my $destdir = '/etc/mail';
my $desthost = 'mx1.my.domain';
my $destuser = 'username';
my @ctrylist;
my $outfile = '/tmp/netblocks';
my @tmpfiles = $outfile;
my %fileloc = ('ftp.apnic.net' =>
  '/apnic/stats/apnic/delegated-apnic-latest',
  'ftp.lacnic.net' => '/pub/stats/lacnic/delegated-lacnic-latest');

chdir ("/tmp");

foreach my $ftpsite (keys%fileloc) {
  my $filename = basename($fileloc{$ftpsite});
  push @tmpfiles, $filename;

  my $ftp = Net::FTP->new($ftpsite, Passive => 1)
    or die "Can't connect to $ftpsite: $@\n";
  $ftp->login or die "Can't get anon login to $ftpsite: $!";
  $ftp->get($fileloc{$ftpsite}) or die
    "Can't get $fileloc{$ftpsite}: $!";
  $ftp->quit;

  open(CFILE, "<$filename") or die "Can't open $filename: $!";
  while (<CFILE>) {
    push(@ctrylist, $_);
  }
  close CFILE;
}

open(OFILE, ">$outfile") or die "Can't open $outfile: $!";
print OFILE sort @ctrylist;
close OFILE;
$scp = Net::SCP->new("$desthost") or die
  "Can't open scp to $desthost: $!";
$scp->login("$destuser");
$scp->cwd("$destdir");
$scp->put("$outfile") or die $scp->{errstr};

unlink(@tmpfiles);

#!/usr/local/bin/perl

# This script grabs the list of address assignments/allocations from
# the ap and lac NICs, parses out the blocks assigned or allocated to
# various countries and prints out a list of CIDR blocks for use with
# sendmail's cidrexpand and acess file.  It then takes that file and
# /etc/mail/acces.stub and creates the new /etc/mail/access file.

# The format of each line in the nic reports are:
# * First line:
#      version|registry|serial|count|start date|end date|checksum
# * Subsequent lines:
#      registry|cc|type|start|length|date|status

use Strict;
use Warnings;

# create a map for the netmasks and CIDR bits
my %netmasks = (
  4 => "30",           8 => "29",
  16 => "28",          32 => "27",
  64 => "26",          128 => "25",
  256 => "24",         512 => "23",
  1024 => "22",        2048 => "21",
  4096 => "20",        8192 => "19",
  16384 => "18",       32768 => "17",
  65536 => "16",       131072 => "15",
  262144 => "14",      524288 => "13",
  1048576 => "12",     2097152 => "11",
  4194304 => "10",     8388608 => "9",
  16777216 => "8"
);

my $netblocks = '/etc/mail/netblocks';
my $access_stub = '/etc/mail/access.stub';
my $access = '/etc/mail/access';

chdir('/etc/mail');

open IN, "<$netblocks" or die "Can't open $netblocks for reading: $!\n";
open STUB, "<$access_stub" or die
  "Can't open $access_stub for reading: $!\n";
open OUT, ">$access" or die "Can't open $access for write: $!\n";

while (<STUB>) {
  print OUT $_;
}

close STUB;

while (<IN>) {
  next unless /(CN|HK|JP|KR|MX|PH|PK|SA|SG|TW)\|ipv4/;
  next if /\|(61|200)\./;
  my @alloc = split /\|/;
  print OUT "$alloc[3]/$netmasks{$alloc[4]}\tERROR:\"550 5.7.1 We 
             don't accept mail from spammers in $alloc[1]\"\n";
}

close IN;
close OUT;

cidrexpand < /etc/mail/access | makemap hash /etc/mail/access