Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!att!pacbell.com!ucsd!ucbvax!NSIPO.NASA.GOV!medin
From: medin@NSIPO.NASA.GOV ("Milo S. Medin", NASA ARC NSI Project Office)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re: gethostbyaddr() failing
Message-ID: <9012181855.AA04659@cincsac.arc.nasa.gov>
Date: 18 Dec 90 18:55:42 GMT
References: <1990Dec17.162511.5678@mlb.semi.harris.com>
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 28


>I believe this is a SUNism and would dare call it a bug.
>
>What's wrong with doing the extra gethostbyname only when necessary (in rsh
> and friends)?

>The way it works now, things like traceroute and netstat break
>(no "A" for FOO.ST.NSF.NET, PTR's returned for host-0 names ala rfc 1101)


It's not a SUN'ism.  We had implemented this at NASA Ames a long time before
it showed up in SunOS.  In fact, we may have well turned in a bug report
on this to SUN.  I know went sent the diffs to UCB.  

You can't do the extra gethostbyname only when necessary, since the library
routine can't know this for sure.  You could modify everything that 
would benefit from it, but the most natural place for it seems to be 
in the library routine itself.  And in a system with shared library support,
you can deploy this without having all the system applications which would 
benefit from it be modified, much less applications written by users
and software vendors.  

There is no reason that the DNS configurations, if done thoroughly, break
netstat and traceroute.  Again, if you configure the DNS information to
be completely consistent, things work fine.  

					thanks,
					   Milo