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From: almquist@JESSICA.STANFORD.EDU ("Philip Almquist")
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re: DNS Query server?
Message-ID: <9002022140.AA16279@jessica.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 2 Feb 90 21:40:58 GMT
References: <334@delta.cs.msstate.edu>
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 31

Frank,
>      Several months ago someone posted a offer of a very simple DNS resolver
> server for UNIX.
>
>      My nearest recollection of the operation of this software was that you
> could connect to this code at a certain port (not the DNS port) and send a
> name and receive an address.

	I don't think that you are going to find what you're looking
for.  The UNIX DNS resolver is pretty simple.  The UNIX DNS server can't
be simple because it has a rather complicated task to perform.

	I suspect that what you heard about is something called an
IEN-116 name server.  IEN-116 was the predecessor to the DNS.  People
who have very obsolete Bridge terminal servers will have IEN-116
servers, or one was probably posted to comp.sources.unix at some point.

	Normally, the IEN-116 server merely turns around and asks a DNS
server, so unless there's some good reason why you have to use the
IEN-116 protocol instead of DNS directly this results in somewhat
pointless extra work.  If your system still has the old /etc/hosts
routines you can probably hack it pretty trivially to use the host table
instead (since that's the way the IEN-116 server originally worked), but
then of course you have to maintain the host table.

	Another problem with IEN-116 is that I've never seen a
publicly-available IEN-116 resolver, so you'd probably have to write
your own.  Since it's a different protocol than DNS, you need to change
rather more than just the port number in your DNS resolver to get it to
work.
							Philip