jst@cca.ucsf.edu (Joe Stong) (11/09/89)
What I'm offering is a temporary, experimental network service: nameservice via telnet. I have sympathy for those users who can't get internet numbers for site names mentioned in NetNews articles. I've been in this position on machines that I don't administer. To get an internet number for a known hostname: telnet ccnext.ucsf.edu 5555 (your telnet gives a startup message) enter-the-site-name-here get.an.internet.number Connection closed. Our machine will do a live name resolution request, and return you the result. It doesn't get MX records. It won't accept a string longer than about 246 characters, due to a bug in the NeXT's resolver routines. This service will disappear without notice, possibly in a few weeks. It is running now. The program is a simple gethostbyname and printf. I'll be happy to hand anyone the source. Someone should be able to cook up scripts or VMS DCL procedures or IBM CMS Procs or REXX procedures to wrap around basic services like telnet and ftp to automatically do resolution before starting up the program. I'd love to be sent copies of these scripts. This service should be implemented eventually on machines LOCAL to the one for whatever (economic, social, political, technical) reasons cannot provide real resolver routines. I don't want to run named here, this is a workstation. Someone else at UCSF publishes our domain directory. Joe Stong jst@cca.ucsf.edu
brnstnd@stealth.acf.nyu.edu (Dan Bernstein) (11/10/89)
In article <2559@ucsfcca.ucsf.edu> jst@cca.ucsf.edu (Joe Stong) writes: > What I'm offering is a temporary, experimental network service: > nameservice via telnet. Excellent. Now could you distribute patches to our mailers---or at least gethostbyname()---so that they work as well with your service as with /etc/hosts? Thanks. And don't forget about VMS. > To get an internet number for a known hostname: > telnet ccnext.ucsf.edu 5555 You meant to say ``telnet 128.218.1.109 5555''---right? ---Dan
jst@cca.ucsf.edu (Joe Stong) (11/10/89)
In article <3894@sbcs.sunysb.edu> brnstnd@stealth.acf.nyu.edu (Dan Bernstein) reminds me: >> What I'm offering is a temporary, experimental network service: >> nameservice via telnet. >> To get an internet number for a known hostname: >> telnet ccnext.ucsf.edu 5555 >You meant to say ``telnet 128.218.1.109 5555''---right? Yes, sorry. 128.218.1.109 == ccnext.ucsf.edu Thanks, Dan. Defeats the purpose if people can't find ME in the first place. >Excellent. Now could you distribute patches to our mailers---or at least >gethostbyname()---so that they work as well with your service as with >/etc/hosts? Thanks. And don't forget about VMS. I'm working on it. I'm slowly understanding the internals of TCP/IP. The calls in VMS are much different than in BSD, though I've got some samples. I'm not sure that people understand that you don't have to run named to get automatic name-to-number lookup. You can build USER programs in BSD that just include libresolv.a to be able to escape using /etc/hosts. Would someone please post the name (and internet number) of some machine that has the resolver sources, and/or the named sources, availiable by anonymous ftp (and the filename)? Would everyone please tell me what reasons THEY have for not putting up the resolver routines on their system? I'll post some sort of summary. Joe Stong jst@cca.ucsf.edu