RX2600 problems running CDE but X failsafe works fine

[John M Poltrack]

After installing Hp-ux 11i (V1.6) on a RX2600 using a static address I have been unable to bring up CDE. I get a modal box which tells me that I may have network configuration problems and /etc/hosts may be incorrect. Unfortunately the name that was given by the network administrator for this system is sqa-67-161. I'm nervous about the inclusion of "-" dashes and the fact that it exceeds 8 character. But the system is accessible via the network and the failsafe mode (with CDE) works fine. Is the network setup the problem? Should I change to a DHCP arrangement? If so is there an easy way to do that. Thanks

[John Bolene]

If you are using DNS, then the reverse lookup by IP must work.

[John M Poltrack]

DNS seems to know about this machine. I tried this from home through a tunnel and sqa-67-161 is the hostname, no problem telneting in using the fully qualified name. My major problem is tryin to discover why I can't get CDE to work. I'm guessing that it's some kind of authentication problem. I tried setting xhost + which is supposed to disable security on the display. Maybe there might be document to suggest

C:\>ping -a 16.129.67.161

Pinging sqa-67-161.mro.cpqcorp.net [16.129.67.161] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 16.129.67.161: bytes=32 time=484ms TTL=246

[Rick Beldin · Accepted solution]

What may be happening is that the uname setting may be failing. The uname (man 2 uname) is limited as follows to 9 characters - 8 + a NULL.

If you attempt to set the uname to longer than this, it will fail. This failure can cause subsequent failure of other subsystems. This is most generally seen in setparms during system setup.

One way to work around this is to have the uname for the machine be something short and then alias it in the hosts file to something longer.

CDE uses both gethostname() and uname() to retrieve the name of the machine so both need to be functional.

[John M Poltrack]

Thanks for the quick reply. I did notice that the nodename was truncated in some of the X files (HPux not the TV series). I'm going to shorten the name and re-register with our DNS administrators. I found that they had similar problems in the past with SCO unix.