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Date:      Sun, 16 Jul 1995 19:07:50 -0700
From:      David Greenman <davidg@Root.COM>
To:        Peter Wemm <peter@haywire.dialix.com>
Cc:        hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: utmp ut_host field 
Message-ID:  <199507170207.TAA03570@corbin.Root.COM>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sun, 16 Jul 95 23:44:31 %2B0800." <Pine.SV4.3.91.950716234026.24370b-100000@haywire.DIALix.COM> 

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>Hi all..
>
>telnetd will store the dotted IP address in the hostname field if the 
>actual name is too long to fit.
>
>w detects this and correctly looks up the real name.
>
>who does not, neither does finger.
>
>tcsh does really strange things.. it tries to 
>gethostbyname("192.9.200.1") and other wierd things.
>
>I like the idea of using the IP address if the full name wont fit, but 
>it's a bit annoying to see only some of the system understanding it.
>
>Would there be objections to me going through and fixing it?  (ie: get 
>rlogind to generate the IP address in the same way that telnetd does, and 
>fix who,finger,tcsh etc so they understand it?

   Yes, I object. I would rather rip out the support in 'w'. This "feature"
was ill conceived and ends up making 'w' appear to hang all the time when a
nameserver is unreachable. This happens all the time on freefall and it is
more than a bit annoying. We've gotten bug reports about it too.
   I would be willing to compromise, however. If you would like to make the
lookup an option rather than the default, I would have no problem with this.
'w' has a -n option to disable the feature, but I hate the feature being the
default.

-DG



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