Date: Mon, 17 Jul 1995 11:33:05 +0800 (WST) From: Peter Wemm <peter@haywire.DIALix.COM> To: David Greenman <davidg@Root.COM> Cc: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: utmp ut_host field Message-ID: <Pine.SV4.3.91.950717111100.6057A@haywire.DIALix.COM> In-Reply-To: <199507170207.TAA03570@corbin.Root.COM>
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On Sun, 16 Jul 1995, David Greenman wrote:
> >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 can imagine.....
> 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.
I have another alternative..
Would you be willing to allow specifing a really small resolver timeout for
these commands? say 2 seconds?
This would add only a couple of lines to the code, and would be a pretty
reasonable alternative to the existing 75 second timeout.
Something like this:
#include <resolv.h>
if (!(_res.options & RES_INIT))
res_init();
_res.retrans = 2;
_res.retry = 0;
As for making it not the default, I'd be quite happy to do this myself if
you'd let me use an environment variable to enable it for the utilities
that care.. :-) (you know, like "BLOCKSIZE", which most of the disk
utilities respect when reporting disk units (df, du, etc)).
> -DG
Cheers,
-Peter
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