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From: lindberg@cs.chalmers.se (Gunnar Lindberg)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re: Domain Name Screaming
Message-ID: <3128@fnatte.cs.chalmers.se>
Date: 4 Jul 89 10:20:52 GMT
References: <37397@sgi.SGI.COM> <8907022301.AA01289@erendira.arc.nasa.gov> <37409@sgi.SGI.COM>
Sender: news@cs.chalmers.se
Organization: Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden
Lines: 31

In article <37409@sgi.SGI.COM> vjs@rhyolite.wpd.sgi.com (Vernon Schryver) writes:
> ...
>Always relying on either DNS or YP is an incomplete answer.  It is
>sometimes necessary to have your own, private extensions to the central
>government's data...

Yes, isn't the answer "lets have both"? We've tried to get around most
problems with a "gethostbyname()" that uses an algorithm like:

    if (index(host, '.'))	/* with '.', use DNS first	*/
    {
	if ( ! (hp = get_ns_hostbyname(host)))
	    hp = get_yp_hostbyname(host);
    }
    else			/* no '.', assume local YP	*/
    {
	if ( ! (hp = get_yp_hostbyname(host)))
	    hp = get_ns_hostbyname(host);
    }

This way we can use short names for hosts within several domains
(yes I know I'm lazy, :-) and catch them via YP, while real domain
names always get resolved by DNS (of course without "ypserv -i").
Possibly one could argue against at all using YP for names which
contains a '.' - personally I don't think that does anything bad.

We haven't tried this in "sharable libc" yet, but I would guess that's
rather straight forward. If anyone wants the changes theyr're available
for "ftp chalmers.se [129.16.1.1], get ucb/named-4.8-cth.shar".

	Gunnar Lindberg