On Sat, 29 Jan 2022 at 16:56, Henry Bent wrote: > On Sat, 29 Jan 2022 at 16:49, Will Senn 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