Use Domain In Hostname Or Not?
Mark Sausville
saus at media-lab.media.mit.edu
Thu Feb 22 05:06:46 AEST 1990
There are host of bugs in Ultrix which caused by inconsistent uses
and assumptions about hostnames. Many seem indeed to be caused
by insufficient buffer space to hold the fully qualified domain
name.
One I ran across the other day was in /etc/dms. The line
SERVER=`/usr/ucb/netstat -i |grep $device |egrep -v "af12|DECnet" | awk '{print $4}'`
is used during some checks which figure out what network the client
and server share.
<#6 hub:/u/saus>netstat -i
Name Mtu Network Address Ipkts Ierrs Opkts Oerrs Coll
scs0 8444 amt-hsc ci-hub.media.mi 787619 0 784094 0 0
ni0 1500 amt-net hub.media.mit.e 19501287 0 23738036 0 0
xna0 1500 amt-garden2 exahub.media.mi 91730 0 142740 0 0
lo0 1536 127 LOCALHOST 62 0 62 0 0
/usr/ucb/netstat -i doesn't have enough room to print the whole
hostname in it's 4th field so /etc/dms reports that the host can't be
found on the net because it checks using a truncated version of the
domain name. Very annoying.
My workaround was to fish out the host part of the domain name and use
that for the check. Not guaranteed to work under all circumstances
(such as a real long hostname (i.e.
asdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdf.foo.com).
It's ironic because there's a lot of code dedicated to seeing that
things are done properly and then there's this really gross bug.
It would be nice if this sort of problem just went away sometime soon.
Regards,
Mark.
Mark Sausville MIT Media Laboratory
Computer Systems Administrator Room E15-354
617-253-0325 20 Ames Street
saus at media-lab.media.mit.edu Cambridge, MA 02139
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