Weekend Update - Ant, Locator, NIS

This weekend I updated the javadoc comments in the IP address locator project. I also started a build.xml file to automate building the project outside of an Eclipse IDE. This is the first time I have used Ant’s manifest nested element of a jar element to create the manifest file inline. Since I only needed two lines in my manifest file creating it inline works great. At this point I would only change back to an external manifest file when I need it explicitly versioned in Subversion and/or when it becomes too large to manage in a build.xml file. The next tasks for my build.xml file are to put a JUnit tag in to run the unit tests and to run the javadoc tag before the jar file is created. In order to run JUnit from within Ant I have to create a classpath element that has the junit.jar file in it. Please download the IPAddressLocatorEAR.ear file and review my work. I’m always interested in questions and comments.

I wasted an incredible amount of time this weekend trying to get my Fedora Core 5 VMWare image to use NIS for account logins to no avail. The output of ypcat passwd.byname shows my database of users but when I su - to a different user I get “incorrect password” as the resposne. As root I can su - to a user listed in the NIS passwd file but not as my user account. I found a post staying that it might be because my user account was not part of the wheel group, but even after adding it the NIS login still doesn’t work. At this point I don’t care, especially since I can’t get those 4 hours of my life back. I’m glad I do most of my “experimental work” in VMWare images that have backups. I rm’d my /etc/passwd file ensuring that no users existed in the instance hoping it would be forced to go to the NIS server. What really happened was that I couldn’t sudo or log in as root to put the file back. The quick fix was blowing away that writable instance and replacing it with a backup taken last week. The funny thing is that hosts are picked up from the NIS server without a problem. Does anyone have some advice on how to get NIS remote logins to work?