[13720] in Athena Bugs
/etc/hosts on Solaris machines
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Theodore Ts'o)
Tue Aug 8 14:45:23 1995
Date: Tue, 8 Aug 1995 14:45:17 -0400
From: Theodore Ts'o <tytso@MIT.EDU>
To: bugs@MIT.EDU
Currently on a newly installed Solaris machine, the /etc/hosts files
reads as follows:
#
# Internet host table
#
127.0.0.1 localhost
18.172.1.4 dcl
I believe we should change the version upgrade and installation scripts
so that /etc/hosts reads as follows:
#
# Internet host table
#
127.0.0.1 localhost
18.172.1.4 dcl.mit.edu dcl
The reason why this change is necessary is that without this change, the
Solaris gethostbyname() for dcl or the gethostbyaddr for 18.172.1.4 will
return "dcl", and not the fully qualified domain name, "dcl.mit.edu".
This breaks code that attempts to use gethostbyname() or gethostbyaddr()
in order to find the fully qualified domain name of the local host.
This is an issue for Kerberized application servers. Arguably, this is
a bug in the Solaris name resolver, and one way to deal with this is to
link using special Athenized name resolver code. However, making this
change to /etc/hosts should be harmless, and it allows people to use the
standard Solaris resolver without losing, at least not due to this
particular bug....
- Ted
