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From: jc@minya.UUCP (John Chambers)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re: inet_ntoa()
Message-ID: <451@minya.UUCP>
Date: 24 Jan 91 04:24:45 GMT
References: <9101111551.AA02933@taipan.coral.com>
Lines: 33

In article <9101111551.AA02933@taipan.coral.com>, greene@coral.com (Jeremy Greene) writes:
> 
> The Sun man pages has the following definition:
>     char *inet_ntoa( ipAddr )
>     struct in_addr ipAddr;
> which use to work, instead of
>     char *inet_ntoa( ipAddr )
>     struct in_addr *ipAddr
> which now works. Has anyone else had this problem?

Yeah; it bit me a couple months ago, while working on some SNMP agents
that had to be coded portably across a set of machines that included
Suns, DECstations, HPs, Convexes, ...

I solved the problem by replacing all the calls on inet_ntoa with a
routine that I spent about 3 minutes writing.  It's easy to do, it's
portable, and it took me far less time to write it than it did to 
diagnose the problem caused by this @#*&$@ variability in inet_ntoa.

(Grumble.  Gripe.  Why do they do this to us?  Do they think that there
is a need of makework, so that programmers will still have jobs? ;-)

Actually, it was benificial, too.  I added a length parameter (which
is always 4 where inet_ntoa was used).  The routine works just fine 
in converting ASN.1 object ids to dotted-decimal notation.  Consider
it one small step in replacing TCP/IP with OSI.  Enough snafus like
this, and it'll all be OSI...

-- 
All opinions Copyright (c) 1991 by John Chambers.  Inquire for licensing at:
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