Isn't time wonderful .....   4.2 and 4.3BSD predates the release of bind,
which was separately sent into the wild..

The good news is that you can certainly get things working with a static
host table.   And frankly for a simulated system, the network is likely to
be very small and you are unlikely to need more modern services like a
browser with URLs et al.   That said, the early bind will work on 4.2/4.3
without a lot of hassle, as that's the system that it was developed.
Except .....   the problem is the >>client side<< is used all over the
place AND that needs to know you a DNS.

My suggestion is getting 4.3 running up with a very small (static) host
table.   Then take on the DNS.   The resolv library (client code) is likely
to have a lot of static calls to the old (non-DNS based) versions of
gethostbyXXX and the like.   If you bring bind over, you'r probably going
to have to do a full rebuild and relink , reinstall of applications space
clients use the DNS, not the static tables.

Have fun.

Clem

On Sat, Jan 29, 2022 at 4:49 PM Will Senn <will.senn@gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm working through 4.3BSD setup and configuration and came across this:
>
>
> "There is no equivalent service for network names yet. The full host and
> network name databases are normally derived from a file retrieved from
> Internet Network Information Center at SRI... use gettable to retrieve the
> NIC host database and htable to convert it to the format used by the
> libraries."
>
>
> Does this mean I should expect functionality like resolv.conf and ping
> yahoo.com not to work in 4.3, or by some miracle is gettable still a
> functional system?
>
>
> Will
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>