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From: gamiddleton@orchid.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: aliases in .rhosts
Message-ID: <11660@orchid.waterloo.edu>
Date: Tue, 10-Nov-87 19:08:51 EST
Article-I.D.: orchid.11660
Posted: Tue Nov 10 19:08:51 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 12-Nov-87 06:12:21 EST
References: <11488@orchid.waterloo.edu> <21654@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Reply-To: gamiddleton@orchid.waterloo.edu (Guy Middleton)
Distribution: comp
Organization: MFCF
Lines: 21

In article <21654@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> bostic@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU (Keith Bostic) writes:
> Yes, I can think of a *very* good reason not to make the change that
> you proposed!  On hosts using the nameserver, your change results
> in a message exchange with the nameserver for each line in the .rhosts
> file!  If any of the hosts listed are remote, and the correct servers
> aren't reachable, this will result in a 45-second pause while attempting
> to canonicalize each such name.  Don't do it!

This should not be a problem for us, since we are not on the Internet (and
even if we were, it is unlikely that people would have distant machines in
their .rhosts files).

That was not the problem, though.  The difficulty is really with the
gethostbyname() function (or perhaps the BIND resolver routines).  Doing
things the old way (lookup in /etc/hosts), gethostbyname() would return a
machine's real name and a list of aliases.  With the new resolver routines,
you don't get any aliases except the name it was called with.  Is there any
way of getting the resolver to return an alias list?  Then I could just
call gethostbyname() once, and compare to that list.

 -Guy