Re: [TUHS] 4.3 BSD network name resolution

[Henry Bent <henry.r.bent@gmail.com>]

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On Sat, 29 Jan 2022 at 16:56, Henry Bent <henry.r.bent@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sat, 29 Jan 2022 at 16:49, 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?
>>
>
> gettable uses flat files to map names to numbers.  It hasn't existed in
> probably 30+ years, and I can't even imagine how large the files it creates
> would be for the modern internet.
>
> Amusingly, for some strange reason it still exists in Solaris 11.2:
> https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E36784_01/html/E36871/gettable-1m.html
>
>
A quick search found me a site with an archive of the HOSTS.TXT files that
gettable and friends used: https://emaillab.jp/dns/hosts/

To give you an idea of how soon things were obsolete, the files from the
'90s have 132.162.32.243 listed as Oberlin's VAX 11/780 ocvaxa, a machine
that had not existed for many years at that point.  The distributed nature
of DNS made things much, much easier to keep current.

-Henry

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