Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!phri!roy From: roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith) Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip Subject: Re: Domain Name Screaming Message-ID: <3833@phri.UUCP> Date: 4 Jul 89 13:42:16 GMT References: <37397@sgi.SGI.COM> <8907022301.AA01289@erendira.arc.nasa.gov> <37409@sgi.SGI.COM> Reply-To: roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith) Organization: Public Health Research Inst. (NY, NY) Lines: 34 In hedrick@geneva.rutgers.edu (Charles Hedrick) writes: > What I think people are complaining about is the combination of YP and > DNS. [...] 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. For companies distributing complete operating systems, I probably agree with Charles. But, what about for somebody like me who is trying to get an MX-groking sendmail to run under an originally YP-based system like SunOS-3.5? Sendmail needs to talk directly to the DNS system because it has to get at MX records. But for the zillions of other programs that have to do name translation, YP works just fine, and Sun's idea of having YP hand off to DNS any query it can't resolve itself seems logical. You don't really expect me to recompile *every* program that calls gethostbyname() do you? Besides, for all it's grossness (and there is plenty) YP still provides a reasonably convenient way to share files with local additions. For example, all our suns share /etc/printcap using YP. Every machine that has direct control of a printer has a local /etc/printcap for that printer. The printcap parsing routines were written to read the local file first and only go to YP if the name can't be resolved there. Show me a way to do that that's easier than YP. Yes, for some applications, YP is a big loose and you need to go full-frontal DNS. But just because a new and better tool comes along doesn't mean you should completely throw out the old ones; for some applications they might actually be better. -- Roy Smith, Public Health Research Institute 455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016 {allegra,philabs,cmcl2,rutgers,hombre}!phri!roy -or- roy@alanine.phri.nyu.edu "The connector is the network"