jc@minya.UUCP (John Chambers) (05/07/90)
In article <18464@nigel.udel.EDU>, law@udel.EDU (Jeff Law) writes: > In article <9005032308.AA14782@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU> craig@NNSC.NSF.NET (Craig Partridge) writes: > >John: > >I think the proper answer to your question is: > > ``who cares what hostname says?'' For starters: sendmail, rsh, rcp, telnet, gethostbyname(), ... > >Hostname is simply a UNIX program to let you give your host a name. It > >has no standing in the Internet protocol suite. If true, then how could SMTP ever possibly work? One of the documentable anomalies is host foo.bar.com calling bletch.org's SMTP port, and one of them rejecting the other because they disagree on the hostname convention. If there were a paragraph in an RFC I could point to, perhaps I could say "All you guys doing it *that* way are wrong." But it looks like I can't say that, so the turkeys will continue insisting they're right, and the anomalies will continue. > agreed. you wouldnt believe how true this is... we found out the hard way, > we've changed all the machines we run to return fully qualified hostnames... > > now i wont mention what YP and some braindamaged shell scripts that only > looked for unqualified hostnames think of this change :) But this is the whole point of the question. Personally, I think that any software that can't handle both conventions is braindamaged. But I can't correct them all; I don't have the time or the source code. Perhaps I could ask it this way: Suppose we were to uniformly adopt one convention of the other. Is there a straighforward way to identify the programs that have problems with it, and diddle their config files so they work correctly? If this can be answered for one convention or the other, that would also answer the original question, at least for pragmatists like me. BTW, are you aware that there are systems being sold that limit hostnames (sometimes doubling as sysnames or nodenames) to 16 bytes? -- John Chambers ...!{harvard,ima,mit-eddie}!minya!jc -- If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate. [Kiel oni ^ci tiun diras esperante?]