Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 19:08:20 -0400 From: "Louis A. Mamakos" <louie@TransSys.COM> To: Doug <Doug@gorean.org> Cc: Glenn Chisholm <glenn@ircache.net>, Evren Yurtesen <yurtesen@ispro.net.tr>, Bill Fumerola <billf@jade.chc-chimes.com>, Michael Mannsberger <mannsber@starmedia.net>, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: (2) hey Message-ID: <199908122308.TAA88002@whizzo.transsys.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 12 Aug 1999 15:52:36 PDT." <Pine.BSF.4.05.9908121548240.83547-100000@dt011n65.san.rr.com> References: <Pine.BSF.4.05.9908121548240.83547-100000@dt011n65.san.rr.com>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
> > That IS a violation of the standard, since A records > are not valid for hosts in in-addr.arpa. > And next I suppose you'll tell me that PTR records are not valid outsize of the IN-ADDR.ARPA portion of the DNS namespace? What people really miss is that the DNS is a distributed database with delegation, used for all sorts of purposes. Some of them are widely known and almost universal (e.g., "look up and address for this host"). Some parts of the namespace are used as indicies for special purposes (e.g., translate a 4 octet IP address into a DNS name). The DNS can store names where the values used for each octet of a label in a DNS name can have any value at all between 0 and 255, including " ", ".", and other rude things. The general purpose mechansim can be (ab)sed for all sorts of purposes not originally envisioned (like Hesiod - you want to exclude "_" from user names?) While gethostbyname() and it's ilk are used for one limited, scoped purpose is no reason to break previously working configurations. That the ISC got a hair up their ass to break all those previously working names is just a shame. Depending on my application, I might just want to have some part of the DNS namespace return object that look like IP addresses for domain names which are not "hosts." The current implemention of bind makes that impossible unless I want to resort to using the raw resolver routines, which is just busy-work. This is just an example of "smart-ass" software that believes it knows better than the user does. louie To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?199908122308.TAA88002>