Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!pacbell.com!ucsd!ucbvax!naggum.uu.no!erik
From: erik@naggum.uu.no (Erik Naggum)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re: Translating names/addresses to human-readable descriptions
Message-ID: <1990-344-45711@uunic.uu.no>
Date: 11 Dec 90 12:41:51 GMT
References: <9012110031.AA11352@warschawski.geom.umn.edu>
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 18

> Beware: the TXT RR is unknown to the BIND 4.8 server, which is still
> pretty widespread.  It may be unknown to some later versions too, I
> haven't checked.  If you use TXT RR's run BIND 4.8, or the secondaries
> for your server run 4.8, you'll lose!  This is probably the reason
> several people, including Paul Pomes at UIUC and we at UMN, use HINFO
> rather than TXT RR's to store miscellaneous text in the DNS -- it's
> kludgy but effective.

Aaarggh!  I thought it would be enough to write an SMTP implementation
for UNIX platforms.  Now it seems it's necessary to write a DNS
implementation, too.  (By "implementation," I don't mean something
which can successfully mislead the amateur into believing it's
conformant, but a true, full, by-the-spec, robust implementation.)

Sigh.

[Erik Naggum]
Naggum Software, Oslo, Norway