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From: mohta@necom830.cc.titech.ac.jp (Masataka Ohta)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.internals
Subject: Re: Shared libraries
Message-ID: <198@titccy.cc.titech.ac.jp>
Date: 16 May 91 07:50:01 GMT
References: <1991May11.100712.27111@jarvis.csri.toronto.edu> <182@titccy.cc.titech.ac.jp> <1991May15.222226.22708@jarvis.csri.toronto.edu>
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In article <1991May15.222226.22708@jarvis.csri.toronto.edu>
	cks@hawkwind.utcs.toronto.edu (Chris Siebenmann) writes:

My point is that gethostent of 4.2BSD is not so bad, definitely not bug.

I am not claiming DNS is bad.

OK?

>| For example, you can't "ifconfig" with a symbolic
>| hostname.

>but isn't using symbolic hostnames with a nameserver
>based ifconfig dangerous or fatal? Presumably your interfaces and IP
>addresses are not yet set at that point, which makes it hard to querry
>nameservers.

Some machines allow host name look up of both local files and DNS, so,
at boot time, symbolic ifconfig works because of local files and later...

It is at least annoying and maybe dangerous but I don't think it fatal.

>You can always have aliases for specific interfaces; I
>don't think the need to use nameserver A records instead of CNAMEs is
>all that much of a hardship (or all that inelegant).

It is, I think, just as ungraceful as naming all interfaces for
authentification.

> Registering all of the hostnames in the authentication data seems to
>be equivalent (in this case) to requiring the users to name all the
>interfaces (either by name or by IPs) when adding such data.

Yes, but not for users.

>Perhaps
>you think this is a reasonable thing to require users to do; I don't. I
>would much rather our users be completely shielded from how the network
>looks today.

In general, there is not so many gateways. Addition of non-gateway
hosts is much more frequent than the network topology change. Network
topology change often accompanied by hosts addition. So...

BTW, I don't think it is reasonable to require normal users to cope with
subtle authentification.

For normal users, relying on netgroups of NIS, which is maintained by
system administrators, is the way to go. Users should not care minor
hosts addition nor topology change.

						Masataka Ohta