[145429] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Were A record domain names ever limited to 23 characters?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Joe Hamelin)
Fri Oct 7 23:51:04 2011
In-Reply-To: <5C17472F-7FD2-4199-9937-A05EE57818E0@delong.com>
Date: Fri, 7 Oct 2011 20:49:25 -0700
From: Joe Hamelin <joe@nethead.com>
To: Owen DeLong <owen@delong.com>
Cc: NANOG <nanog@nanog.org>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
On Fri, Oct 7, 2011 at 8:25 PM, Owen DeLong <owen@delong.com> wrote:
>Yes, this was because some very old (current at the time, however)
>implementations of gethostbyname(3) were implemented in such a way that if
>the first character they saw returned isdigit()==TRUE, then,
>they would assume that they had been passed an IP address
>and would attempt to encode the string as an IP address rather
>than looking it up in /etc/hosts or DNS.
Now I'm going to have to look at the current gethostbyname(3) and see what
happens if we ever get a tld that is a decimal number under 255. Yet
another reason for IPv6.
--
Joe Hamelin, W7COM, Tulalip, WA, 360-474-7474
