HP-UX 10.20 behind a firewall

[Matthew Richardson]

I am attempting to run 10.20 behind a firewall that uses NAT (Network Address Translation). However CDE fails because the ToolTalk server (ttsession) fails to start. Moreover swinstall fails because it cannot contact (hostname).

I want to know if this is related to the fact the system cannot lookup it own domain name. If so, is there a work around?

[Bill Hassell]

Yes, Xwindows (CDE) very much depends onn complete IP address services. You are probably using a DNS server to resolve your network addresses and it had no idea how to represent your local box because of NAT. But that is fixable. First, make sure that /etc/hosts has localhost defined as in:

127.0.0.1 localhost loopback

Then, make sure your local IP address and hostname are shown, but to avoid future difficulties, add the FQDN (Fully Qualified Domain Name), the hostname with a trailing dot and FQDN with a trailing dot. Something like:

12.34.56.78 mypcu mycpu.mynet.com mycpu. mycpu.mynet.com.

Then, edit /etc/nsswitch.conf to specify files then dns for the hosts line. If you don't have an nsswitch.conf file, get a generic copy from /usr/newconfig/etc/nsswitch.conf and then change the hosts line to:

hosts: files [NOTFOUND=continue] dns

This will satisfy name resolution for your local machine without bothering the DNS server (and save some network bandwidth at the same time).