[283] in Hesiod
Re: info please
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (jweiss@MIT.EDU)
Thu Jul 6 11:26:17 1995
From: jweiss@MIT.EDU
Date: Thu, 6 Jul 1995 11:21:57 -0400
To: mdr@twdb.state.tx.us (Mark Robbins 475-2580)
Cc: hesiod@MIT.EDU, jaster@twdb.state.tx.us
In-Reply-To: [281]
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.
Hesiod has been in daily use at MIT for several 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@MIT.EDU). Bugs in the current implementation of
Hesiod may be reported by sending e-mail to hesiod-bugs@MIT.EDU
For further reading, see the paper on the Winter 1988 Usenix
conference proceedings.
If you ftp to athena-dist.mit.edu, and cd to /pub/ATHENA, there is a tar
file hesiod.tar.Z. This contains both the hesiod distribution as well
as a paper describing it.
Hesiod is a registered trademark of MIT.
Jonathon Weiss
jweiss@mit.edu
MIT IS/DCNS Programmer
