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From: davy@ERG.SRI.COM ("David A. Curry")
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip.domains
Subject: Re: innovative use of HINFO records
Message-ID: <9105131515.AA02280@intrepid.erg.sri.com>
Date: 13 May 91 15:15:08 GMT
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     From:  swrinde!sdd.hp.com!caen!sol.ctr.columbia.edu!emory!ox.com!ox.com!emv@ucsd.edu  (Ed Vielmetti)
     Date:  12 May 91 00:29:39 GMT
     Subject:  innovative use of HINFO records

     
     as a small aid to the problem, i point you to the uiuc.edu domain's
     use of "HINFO" records to spell out the full names of departments.  
     e.g.
     
     cso.uiuc.edu.	50375	HINFO	Computing_Services_Office NONE
     ag.uiuc.edu.	50400	HINFO	College_of_Agriculture NONE
     
     To the extend that these tokens match with existing or eventual X.500
     identifiers, so much the better.  It's often possible to discover (or
     extract from a human postmaster) similar information and lists, but to
     the extent that more information can be sensibly slipped into the
     domain name service it seems a good idea to do so.
     
An interesting idea, but isn't this what TXT RR's are for?  (I realize
BIND didn't support TXT RR's until recently.)  I've done something
somewhat different here:

I have put a TXT RR in for each and every host which says things about
the configuration of the machine ("diskless", "server", "dataless",
"standalone", etc.).  Then I have a program which dumps the name
server, pings all the hosts, and then generates files for rdist based
on the contents of the TXT RR's and whether or not the host is "up" or
not.  Works fairly well.

My idea for the TXT RR was to impose some sort of format on the string
(or use multiple records, I suppose) so you could go so far as to do
something like:

IN	TXT	"owner=comp. sci.;user=joe blow;room=EJ305;config=dataless"

or

IN	TXT	"owner=Department of Computer Science"
IN	TXT	"user=Joe Blow"
IN	TXT	"room=EJ305"
IN	TXT	"config=dataless"

or whatever.  The only problem, at least in our environment, is that
every time a machine gets shuffled (which happens often around here),
the TXT RRs have to be updated if you keep location and user
information in them.  This can get to be a pain real fast.

--Dave Curry, SRI International