[15] in Hesiod
Re: I am bewildered
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Win Treese)
Sun Nov 20 00:09:14 1988
To: clyde@mizar.cc.utexas.edu (Clyde Hoover)
Cc: hesiod@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Your message of Fri, 18 Nov 88 15:58:36 -0600.
Date: Sat, 19 Nov 88 23:52:14 EST
From: Win Treese <treese@ATHENA.MIT.EDU>
> I have been hacking upon Hesiod (from the first public release version)
> for the last couple of days and I have a few questions/problems:
> 1. The examples show use of named data type 'TXT' but the Hesiod lib
> routines ask for 'UNSPEC' records, never 'TXT' ones. Hence NO Hesiod
> request will EVER be answered.
Did you see the announcement of the "fixed first public version"? The
problem you described was inadvertently in the distribution; the "fixed
first" version had it repaired. The new one is available on athena-dist.mit.edu
and gatekeeper.dec.com as hesiod.tar.Z now.
> 2. Named (with ALLOC_T_UNSPEC enabled) uses a strange format for
> UNSPEC records (something about lengths and checksums), which is
> totally undocumented (even looking at the source doesn't help too much),
> but appears to be extremly clumsy for a human to produce.
Since Hesiod doesn't actually use UNSPEC records, I'm not sure about the
format used.
> 3. The Hesiod lib routines totally ignore CNAME records but the examples
> include them.
I'm not sure what you mean here. The name daemon handles CNAME records
internally; these are not relevant to the client.
> 4. Attempting to run Hesiod outside of the normal named system is
> a major pain. We already have BIND in our libc, but for testing I have
> redirected Hesiod stuff to a different port, so I can't just link with
> the standard BIND. There are name conflicts between libc and the
> resolver code and the Hesiod code that caused no small end of grief.
> I doubt that we wi> ll run Hesiod as a part of our standard nameserver,
> so we will need to make using it 'standalone' easy to do. This release
> will take some work to allow that to happen.
We've never tried to do that, but it should be possible with the "fixed"
version. The library name conflicts are part of the problem with
the original distribution, and are fixed in the updated one.
I think it is much easier to build the updated one; let me know if you
have problems with it.
- Win
