verber@pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu (Mark A. Verber) (12/03/89)
I have been very troubled in the last year to see some many people worrying about IP addresses. People have talked about host tables being out of date or missing new hosts. This is understandable, and this is why domain name service was invented. People need to at least be running name resolvers! I understand that not all vendors supply resolvers. There are two responces we should have. (1) Scream at the vendor until they do supply a resolver and network tools that talk to the resolver, (2) use schemes that don't force users to use raw ip addresses. For mail this means finding a mail gateway that does talk to domain name service (including MX records) and ask them kindly to allow you to route mail through them. Anything less is a crime against our users. An example of spending time on the wrong side of the problem: someone just posted an article about a config to allow sendmail to send to a raw ip address... that is fine, but users shouldn't have to worry about such things... hell, I as an admin don't want to worry about such things. My personal feeling is that if a site that is on the Internet wants to recieve mail, it is only reasonable to register that machine. If they don't, they don't deserve to recieve mail. It doesn't take much to add a host to a existing domain (1minute or so). Our efforts should be to move people into the '80s rather than find workarounds. My experience has been that alot of people that could be running resolvers aren't. I know that there are some sites that are running with defective networking code, but I have run into many sites that could have an MX understanding mailer, or a telnet that uses address resolution, but they haven't been willing to take the time to understand what needs to be done. There is a common culture among many of the Internet sites. We believe in name service because we watched host table start to break, We got tired for addresses like foo%bar!baz@bag.arpa so we push for MXing the world, etc. With the success of workstations and NSFnet there are a lot of people who haven't experienced these changes. I have seen a number of sites that don't even know about name servers. It never occured to them to look for it. This is going to be increasingly common it we aren't careful. Workstations are being sold like personal computers. Network connections (thanks to NSFnet) are becoming increasingly common. I believe that there are two things that need to be done. One is taking the time to educate sys admins about things like name service, mail exchangers, etc. The second is to encourge vendors to improve their default configurations and documentation. -- Mark A. Verber System Programmer, Physics Department, Ohio State University verber@pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu (614) 292-8002
seeger@manatee.cis.ufl.edu (F. L. Charles Seeger III) (12/05/89)
In article <1170@pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu> verber@pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu (Mark A. Verber) writes: |I understand that not all vendors supply resolvers. There are two |responces we should have. (1) Scream at the vendor until they do |supply a resolver and network tools that talk to the resolver, (2) use |schemes that don't force users to use raw ip addresses. May I suggest (3) Don't buy hardware from vendors that don't either supply the resolver routines or give you source so that you can fix it yourself. Get a demo machine and make them show you that it works. -- Charles Seeger E301 CSE +1 904 335 8053 CIS Department University of Florida MIPS R6000: "The latest Killer seeger@ufl.edu Gainesville, FL 32611 Micro from Hell" --Eugene Brooks