Date: Mon, 26 Jun 2023 21:38:26 -0400 From: Lowell Gilbert <freebsd-questions-local@be-well.ilk.org> To: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Using /etc/hosts, not dns Message-ID: <44y1k5n0q5.fsf@be-well.ilk.org> In-Reply-To: <20230626194054.6a3119f50513650f249b2312@sohara.org> (Steve O'Hara-Smith's message of "Mon, 26 Jun 2023 19:40:54 %2B0100") References: <846f37ec-c0b3-0b1a-6294-1da6a9260777@Gmail.com> <1ED24C4A-FABF-4096-970D-4017616FC124@vanderzwan.org> <ebb7199a-98bc-980e-a077-f7a7c7085b4e@Gmail.com> <F269F458-919D-42D4-BDE4-E7A56C74BB02@vanderzwan.org> <6c840288-0446-122d-7d97-d6b02982e27c@Gmail.com> <20230626194054.6a3119f50513650f249b2312@sohara.org>
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Steve O'Hara-Smith <steve@sohara.org> writes: > On Mon, 26 Jun 2023 14:35:06 -0400 > Steven Friedrich <freebsdlouisville@gmail.com> wrote: > >> Correct, Linux still works. After all these years and my extensive Unix >> experience, I am abandoning FreeBSD. You have completely abandoned >> common sense. > > The host command has been specified to only use DNS for as long as > it has existed. If there's an implementation of host that reads the hosts > file then it is that implementation which is anomalous not the FreeBSD one. And it's documented to be a DNS lookup utility on my (Ubuntu) Linux system also. But that version also first gives a result from /etc/hosts, in the form: theserver has address 172.30.250.1 It looks like the Ubuntu host(1) program comes from ISC, just like the one in the bind-tools package on FreeBSD, but it's been modified to check /etc/hosts as well. I suspect that Linux distributions vary on this, although I'm too lazy to go around checking. I don't think this is necessarily a bad piece of functionality, but given that host(1) is specifically a DNS lookup tool, it should definitely indicate when it is giving results that don't come from doing a DNS lookup. As far as I know, "host" is not a POSIX standard command, so it can be anything its host (no pun intended) system wants it to be. However, all of the versions I can find (easily) either come from the ISC codebase or are trying to imitate ISC, so I think it's only reasonable to assume that its results reflect a DNS query. My take is that what the original poster expects isn't unreasonable, but people with that superficial an understanding of how things work probably shouldn't be editing /etc/hosts in the first place. Be well.
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