Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!geneva.rutgers.edu!hedrick From: hedrick@geneva.rutgers.edu (Charles Hedrick) Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip Subject: Re: Domain Name Screaming Message-ID: Date: 3 Jul 89 22:13:09 GMT References: <37397@sgi.SGI.COM> <8907022301.AA01289@erendira.arc.nasa.gov> <37409@sgi.SGI.COM> Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J. Lines: 22 I accept your justification for providing the option to use pure YP to handle host names. What I think people are complaining about is the combination of YP and DNS. If people are on a self-contained network that doesn't use the DNS, by all means let them use YP. However if they need the DNS, they should use it directly -- not frontended by YP. Having two different sources for the same information is asking for trouble, and having systems as complex as YP and the DNS interact, particularly with caches in between, is going to make problem diagnosis a nightmare. If somebody is using the mixed YP/DNS, they're going to have to learn how to set up the DNS anyway. You haven't gained them anything by mixing the two. You've just made their setup a lot more complex. Sun's approach of providing different versions of the sharable libc is a good one. (So is providing libc_pic.a, since it lets me replace the resolver with the newest Berkeley one.) Even easier would be an approach where gethostbyname checks for some file (e.g. /etc/resolv.conf) to see which approach to use. That way they'd only have to distribute one binary. Pyramid checks for /etc/nameserver. It's a file whose contents don't matter. If it is present, their gethostbyname talks to the DNS rather than the host table.