[TUHS] Of login (and host) names

[TUHS] Of login (and host) names

[Norman Wilson]

Google was not the first place Rob and Dave had fun with names.

At one point, Rob had a duplicate entry in /etc/passwd,
with login name r, password empty, normal userid/groupid/home
directory, special shell.  The shell program checked whether
it was running on a particular host and a particular hardwired
serial line: if yes, it ran the program that started the Research
version of the window system for our bitmapped terminals;
otherwise it just exited.  The idea seemed to be to let him
log in quickly in his office.

I think that by the time I arrived at Bell Labs he'd stopped
using it, because it no longer worked, because we no longer
ran serial lines directly from computers to offices--everyone
was connected via serial-port Datakit instead.

While I was there, senior management bought a Cray X-MP/24 for
the research group.  (Thank you for using AT&T.)  Since it too
was accessible via Datakit (using a custom hardware interface
built by Alan Kaplan, but that's another story), it had to have
a hostname.  It was either Dave or Rob, I forget which, who
suggested 3k, because (a) it was a supercomputer, so `big bang'
seemed to fit; (b) it was Arno Penzias, then VP for Research,
who got us the money, so `big bang' and 3K radiation seemed
even more appropriate; and, most important, (c) it was fun to
see whether a hostname beginning with a digit broke anything.

So far as I recall, nothing broke.  Some people who were
involved with TCP/IP networking at the labs were frightened
about it; I don't remember whether that Cray was ever connected
to an IP network so I don't know whether anything went wrong
there.  Of course such names are not a problem today, but
in those long-lost days when nobody worried much about buffer
overflows either, such bugs were much more common.  Weren't they?

Norman Wilson
Toronto ON

[TUHS] Of login (and host) names

[Mary Ann Horton]

When we were running the UUCP Zone, 3Com wanted to register 3com.com 
through us.  ISI balked at it, saying the RFC said domains had to start 
with a letter.  It turned out the original code decided if it was an IP 
address or a domain name by looking at whether the first character was a 
letter or digit.  We pushed back, it was allowed, and the code (and 
eventually RFC) was fixed.  UUCP, of course, didn't have that issue.

     Mary Ann

On 07/18/2016 07:35 AM, Norman Wilson wrote:
>
> While I was there, senior management bought a Cray X-MP/24 for
> the research group.  (Thank you for using AT&T.)  Since it too
> was accessible via Datakit (using a custom hardware interface
> built by Alan Kaplan, but that's another story), it had to have
> a hostname.  It was either Dave or Rob, I forget which, who
> suggested 3k, because (a) it was a supercomputer, so `big bang'
> seemed to fit; (b) it was Arno Penzias, then VP for Research,
> who got us the money, so `big bang' and 3K radiation seemed
> even more appropriate; and, most important, (c) it was fun to
> see whether a hostname beginning with a digit broke anything.
>
> So far as I recall, nothing broke.  Some people who were
> involved with TCP/IP networking at the labs were frightened
> about it; I don't remember whether that Cray was ever connected
> to an IP network so I don't know whether anything went wrong
> there.  Of course such names are not a problem today, but
> in those long-lost days when nobody worried much about buffer
> overflows either, such bugs were much more common.  Weren't they?
>
> Norman Wilson
> Toronto ON

[TUHS] Of login (and host) names

[John Cowan]

Norman Wilson scripsit:

> So far as I recall, nothing broke.  Some people who were
> involved with TCP/IP networking at the labs were frightened
> about it; I don't remember whether that Cray was ever connected
> to an IP network so I don't know whether anything went wrong
> there.  Of course such names are not a problem today, 

ISTR that {net,comp}.bugs.4bsd gave some news software a headache.

-- 
John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
In the sciences, we are now uniquely privileged to sit side by side
with the giants on whose shoulders we stand.  --Gerald Holton