Configuring Electronic Mail
The desktop mailer uses sendmail for delivering mail between systems. See the sendmail(1M) man page for more information on how to configure email connectivity.
Before attempting to send or receive mail from the desktop, you should test that you can correctly send and receive mail using the mailx command.
Configuring X Authorization
The desktop uses the default X mechanism for authorizing remote applications (X clients) to access a local display. The easiest way to configure this is to provide a networked home directory for each user. This ensures that the following requirements are met:
The user must have read and write permission to the file HomeDirectory/.Xauthority.
The .Xauthority file on an application server must contain the "magic cookie" for the display on which the application will run.
For more information, see the X(1) or xauth(1) man pages.
Configuring Desktop Clients and Servers
This section covers network configuration requirements that are specific to the desktop--that is, these capabilities are provided by the desktop rather than by the base operating system.
The section is divided into two parts:
Configuring login and session services.
Configuring services required by applications and their data. This includes application, database, icon, file, and help servers and their clients.
Configuring Login and Session Services
A login/session server is a system that supplies desktop services (Login Manager, Session Manager, File Manager, Window Manager, and so on) to a display and X server.
Typically, a session server supplies services to X terminals. However, a network configuration can be set up that concentrates session services on one or more servers that are accessed by both X terminals and workstations.
Login Manager is the desktop component responsible for supplying login services to other displays. Once the user has logged in, Session Manager is started for the user.
For information about configuring login/session servers and X terminals, see "Displaying a Login Screen on a Network Display".
Configuring Other Application-Related Services
This section covers networking requirements common to the desktop:
To Configure Desktop Clients and Servers
Provide the operating system network configurations required by the desktop.
See "Configuring Base Operating System Networking for the Desktop".
Install the desktop or the minimum set of files.
You must install:
Configure the system for the ToolTalk filename database server daemon rpc.ttdbserver.
This should happen automatically when the desktop is installed. For more information, see "Configuring the ToolTalk Database Server".
Install and configure the subprocess control daemon (dtspcd).
This should happen automatically when the desktop is installed. For more information, see "Configuring the Subprocess Control Daemon".
Mount all required remote data.
Data is considered "remote" when it is located on a system other than the system on which the application using the data is running.
For example:
If an application uses data located on a file server, it must mount those files.
If File Manager icons are located on an icon server, the session server must mount those files.
If the network uses a help server for desktop help files, the session server and all application servers must mount the help data.
For more information about mount points, see the next section, "Configuring the Mount Point for Remote File Systems".
Configuring the Mount Point for Remote File Systems
When the desktop passes file names from one system to another, it must transform, or map, those file names to names that make sense to the destination system. This mapping is necessary because a file may be mounted in different locations on the different systems, and therefore must be accessed using different names. For example the file /projects/big on sysA may be accessed as /net/sysA/projects/big on sysB.