The following reply was made to PR lib/46111; it has been noted by GNATS.
From: christos%zoulas.com@localhost (Christos Zoulas)
To: gnats-bugs%NetBSD.org@localhost, lib-bug-people%netbsd.org@localhost,
gnats-admin%netbsd.org@localhost, netbsd-bugs%netbsd.org@localhost
Cc:
Subject: Re: lib/46111: yplib will hang forever if no server can be found
Date: Tue, 28 Feb 2012 13:40:45 -0500
On Feb 28, 4:20pm, Wolfgang.Stukenbrock%nagler-company.com@localhost
(Wolfgang.Stukenbrock%nagler-company.com@localhost) wrote:
-- Subject: lib/46111: yplib will hang forever if no server can be found
| The original yplib.c from Sun has a bug that it will hang forever
| in some situations, if no yp-server can be found.
Yes, I think that this was done by design. Back when I was at school,
we had 1 yp server and many clients. When the server crashed, people
tended to reboot their workstations which would then come back up before
the server finished fsck, thus not finding any nis server. When ypbind
tried to start, they would hang and wait saying:
'yp server not responding; still trying'
instead of letting it fail and proceeding. This behavior was useful,
because most of the user and group database was not stored locally,
so coming up multi-user without it would require a reboot anyway.
All these have changed right now, but I would prefer to make such a change
in a compatible way, letting the program choose its behavior with a flag
or some configuration file.
christos