[152] in Hesiod
Hesiod Overview
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Mark Rosenstein)
Wed Sep 1 10:30:04 1993
Date: Wed, 1 Sep 93 10:25:54 EDT
From: Mark Rosenstein <mar@MIT.EDU>
To: ispare@ukpoit.co.uk
Cc: hesiod@Athena.MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Ian John Spare's message of Wed, 01 Sep 1993 09:40:59 +0100 <9309010843.AA17524@george.ukpoit.co.uk>
Hesiod is a general purpose naming system. It is layered on top of
the Internet-standard Domain Name System (DNS) using the Berkeley
Internet Name Daemon (BIND). Hesiod will return an array of strings
of data based on a name and a type, such as a login name and PASSWD
returning a line from an /etc/passwd file, or a printer name and PCAP
returning an /etc/printcap entry. It provides similar functionality
to Sun's Yellow Pages, but with different tradeoffs. Hesiod is more
secure (but not really secure), scales up to larger communities, and
does not make exessive use of broadcast packets, but is somewhat more
difficult to setup and maintain.
The package we distribute is based on BIND 4.8.1 and consists of a
modified copy of named, a modified resolver library, and a new hesiod
library which implements a couple of functions layered over the
resolver library. It also comes with a trivial client, hesinfo, and
some code examples. Recent releases of BIND have the hesiod
functionality already built in to them, but you still need our
distribution for the client library and applications.
Hesiod has been in daily use at MIT for a number of years, and has
proved quite reliable. Discussions about Hesiod occur on the Internet
mailing list 'hesiod' (to be added to the mailing list, send an e-mail
message with your name and Internet e-mail address to
hesiod-request@ATHENA.MIT.EDU). Bugs in the current implementation of
Hesiod may be reported by sending e-mail to hesiod-bugs@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
For further reading, see the paper on the Winter 1988 Usenix
conference proceedings.
This is all available by using anonymous FTP to the host
ATHENA-DIST.MIT.EDU (ip address 18.71.0.38); cd to the "pub" directory
and look there for subdirectories named after the particular software
components.
