brain-damage in SysV/386 r3.2 uname, etc.

[Greg A. Woods]

In article <5207 at auspex.auspex.com> guy at auspex.auspex.com (Guy Harris) writes:
>[....
Guy provided some very detailed and insightful information about
uname(1,2) and and the historical background.  Thanks!
>....]
> *However*, the S5R4 *User's Reference Manual* says that the "uname"
> command prints "nodename" by default, and that "uname -s" prints "the
> name of the current operating system (e.g., UNIX System V)".  It also
> indicates that "uname -S" changes the nodename, and doesn't seem to say
> that it changes the "sysname".  I hope that the problem is that the SVID
> just hasn't caught up to reality....

The part that really pissed me off, and "made" me post my bug report
in the first place was the fact that in SysVr3.x/386 "uname -S"
changed both `sysname' and `nodename' to the same value, and the only
way to avoid that would be to rewrite uname such that it could not
call sysi86(SETNAME) and subsequently disable any sysadm things that
took advantage of this "feature", *and* remember to reboot the system
after building a new kernel with the new values.  Now that I've found
out the code which does this nonsense is ifdef'ed to i386 I'm really
pissed!  I hope S5R4's uname is indeed "fixed" (on all platforms).

> (Of course, you now have the question of on *which* communications network
> the machine is known by what's in "nodename".  The machine's name on a

At one time I though this would be a good use for `sysname' and
`nodename', but I gave that up a long time ago!  :-)

Anyone choosing the contents of `nodename' should really read rfc1178!

PS, I also agree that `machine' should indicate the highest level ABI.
-- 
							Greg A. Woods
woods@{eci386,gate,robohack,ontmoh,tmsoft}.UUCP		ECI and UniForum Canada
+1-416-443-1734 [h]  +1-416-595-5425 [w]  VE3TCP	Toronto, Ontario CANADA
Political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible-ORWELL