Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!know!sdd.hp.com!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!ncar!gatech!udel!princeton!twg.com!david From: david@twg.com (David S. Herron) Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip.domains Subject: Re: How to create /etc/hosts from zone Keywords: hosts Message-ID: <8323@gollum.twg.com> Date: 21 Nov 90 20:23:45 GMT References: <19523@oolong.la.locus.com> <1667@devildog.att.com> <1990Nov15.185211.876@hemel.bull.co.uk> <1990Nov16.150818.5844@ssd.kodak.com> Reply-To: david@twg.com (David S. Herron) Organization: The Wollongong Group, Palo Alto, CA Lines: 30 In article <1990Nov16.150818.5844@ssd.kodak.com> sloey@ssd.kodak.com (Jim Sloey (253-7956)) writes: >In article <1990Nov15.185211.876@hemel.bull.co.uk> pmoore@hemel.bull.co.uk (Paul Moore) writes: >>another possibility (ie resolving the problem of keeping hosts for stupid >>systems and needing a named database) is to keep the /etc/hosts as the >>master a use a utility to generate the named database from it. ... >Instead I wrote a shell program (makehosts) to create hosts from domain data >using nslookup and zone transfers. It is called from an editor (vins) which >locks the file and updates the serial field like vipw, then creates a new host >table using HINFO for the comments. >Unfortunately, I left out the CNAMES, so my program won't help you much. I think both of these approaches are wrong &that the correct thing to do is keep a seperate relation or relations (that is, file(s)) which keep the full data for both purposes plus any other data you might want to keep. For instance: physical location, primary user, grant number, etc. Then you write specific scripts to extract different "views" of the data, /etc/hosts & named config files being two popular views. This is what we did at ms.uky.edu &while we hated the language the scripts were written in -- the result worked pretty well. It was part of a whole distributed configuration management system that one of the people did for his masters thesis. The paper(s) got published in one of the Usenix Large Systems SIG proceedings, about a year ago. -- <- David Herron, an MMDF & WIN/MHS guy, <- Formerly: David Herron -- NonResident E-Mail Hack <- <- Use the force Wes!