Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!wuarchive!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!uxc.cso.uiuc.edu!paul
From: paul@uxc.cso.uiuc.edu (Paul Pomes - UofIllinois CSO)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip.domains
Subject: Re: HINFO && rfc1010 && rfc1033
Message-ID: <1990Jul13.132945.28115@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Date: 13 Jul 90 13:29:45 GMT
References: <1990Jul13.044651.10354@ctr.columbia.edu>
Sender: usenet@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu (News)
Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana
Lines: 31

seth@ctr.columbia.edu (Seth Robertson) writes:

>The questions is what to do: "SUNOS-4.0" comes to mind, but that does
>have a period in it.

I punt on this question as maintaining the accuracy of version data for
dispersed sites is a needless nightmare.  For OS I select from the pool
of {UNIX,DOS,VMS,MAC-OS,STAND-ALONE}.  The latter is for boxes with
embedded operating systems such as routers.

>I suppose the other question might be does any program use the HINFO
>field.  A human would obviously not care whether the period (or space)
>is there or not, while a program certainly might.  Does bind itself
>care/notice?

I know of one program that does use the HINFO record and came across it at the
Pittsburg IETF meeting.  The telnet program running on the VMS VAXstations
(Wollongong's, I believe) would display on the title bar:

	Connected to uxc.cso.uiuc.edu, a VAX-3500 running UNIX.

Somehow I don't believe this program would care what was inside those strings.
I don't recall any problems in the past with putting periods into HINFO records
insofar as BIND was concerned.

/pbp
--
         Paul Pomes

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