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From: <ron@ronnatalie.com>
To: "'Lars Brinkhoff'" <lars@nocrew.org>, <reed@reedmedia.net>
Cc: tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org
Subject: Re: [TUHS] looking for HOSTS.TXT parsers and how is /dev/net/HOSTNAME enabled?
Date: Fri, 19 Apr 2019 07:57:03 -0400	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <444601d4f6a7$01d00b90$057022b0$@ronnatalie.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <7wa7gmk5fj.fsf@junk.nocrew.org>

Amusing thing on parsers.    I had written a short C subroutine to eat HOSTS.TXT directly which we used rather than the Berkeley /etc/hosts format.
It presented the same interface to the caller as the Berkeley one.

We found out that when we added a host with a type "68000" that we suddenly broke every straight BSD system.   Apparently, they used a YACC grammar to parse HOSTS.TXT into /etc/hosts and had screwed it up assuming the machine type field (like the hostname) had to begin with a letter.     It didn't help that the machine we added was named "BRL-ZAP."    There was some discussion that we had done this intentionally.    I pointed out that a YACC grammar was way overkill and there must be some existing file on UNIX that has fields separated by colons that there was simpler stuff written to parse 😊    Anyhow, for expedience Jake just added an "MC" on to the machine type to appease the Berkeley toadies.

There was a protocol defined to download the host file which we ran nighly .



  reply	other threads:[~2019-04-19 12:02 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 8+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2019-04-19  1:54 reed
2019-04-19  2:38 ` Warner Losh
2019-04-19  4:03 ` Lars Brinkhoff
2019-04-19 11:57   ` ron [this message]
2019-04-19 18:43 ` Clem Cole
2019-04-19 18:54   ` Clem Cole
2019-04-19 21:52   ` reed
2019-04-19 22:50     ` Clem Cole

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