Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cs.utexas.edu!ut-emx!mic
From: mic@ut-emx.UUCP (Mic (... K[a-z]+) Kaczmarczik)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: X11R2/SunOS 3.2 + gethostbyname?
Summary: check netdb.h vs. library you get gethostbyname() from
Message-ID: <7153@ut-emx.UUCP>
Date: 21 Oct 88 22:39:38 GMT
References: <1574@cayman.COM>
Reply-To: mic@emx.UUCP (Mic Kaczmarczik)
Organization: UT Austin Computation Center, User Services Unix Support Group
Lines: 36

In article <1574@cayman.COM> brad@cayman.COM (Brad Parker) writes:
>Perhaps I am half a step behind the rest of the world; I was unable to
>get X11R2 clients built with SunOS 3.2 to work on anything but local (unix)
>sockets. They would crash in bcopy() from XConnectDisplay() if environment
>variable DISPLAY was set or "-display xxx:0" was used.
>
>I tracked it down to what looks like abberhent behavior of gethostbyname()
>on Sun's. They seem to return a unsigned long IP address where other machines
>return a ptr to the same. (struct hostent *)->h_addr

I don't know if this is exactly Brad's situation, but we had the same
sort of problem when we installed the Berkeley name server software on
our Suns, then later rebuilt the X library.  The clients all core
dumped just as Brad describes above, and we traced it to the version
of netdb.h we had installed as part of the nameserver installation. 

I'd check your version of netdb.h to see if it treats the h_addr field
in a hostent struct as a char * (SunOS 3.4, static host table lookup)
or a char ** (4.3 BSD, BIND name server). The netdb.h you use to
compile the clients with has to match the library you get
gethostbyname() from: if you just link against the SunOS libc.a, you
need the char * version, whereas if you see h_addr defined as a char
**, you can probably add -lresolv to the SYSAUX_LIBRARIES line in the
standard Makefiles and relink everything to get the newer
gethostbyname().

We chose to back down from the name server until we had time to
install BIND 4.8 (we were using 4.5 and having problems), so we
re-installed the old netdb.h, rebuilt XConnectDisplay, relinked the
clients, and they worked fine. 

--mic--
-- 
Mic Kaczmarczik			If you drink, don't drill.
UT Austin Computation Center			-- Matt Groening
mic@emx.utexas.edu	
MIC@UTAIVC.BITNET