Re: [TUHS] looking for HOSTS.TXT parsers and how is /dev/net/HOSTNAME enabled?

[reed@reedmedia.net]

Replying to two messages here:

On Fri, 19 Apr 2019, Lars Brinkhoff wrote:
> Here is a collection, but most of them are from after that date.
> 
> https://github.com/ttkzw/hosts.txt

Thanks. I should have mentioned I looked there. It doesn't have it as 
far as I see. It has the same data for the pre-1982 files I already 
have (but they are not RFC 608 style).

But it was interesting to see the three MIT/Stanford versions. I think 
they have a different format unless I misunderstand. Since I cannot find 
SRI-NIC examples (before RFC 810) I don't know for sure.  
https://github.com/ttkzw/hosts.txt/blob/master/pub/hosts/19830119/HOSTS.TXT

If you can point me to PDP-10 ITS routines, I'd appreciate it.

On Fri, 19 Apr 2019, Clem Cole wrote:
>       1) I am looking for parsers for ancient (pre mid 1982)
...
> Got to Warren's archives for BSD 4.2 and look for the htable(8) and
> gettable(8).? I believe the parsing routines will be in htable(8).

Thanks. I have them already (including 4.1c.2). They are the newer 
format. I had looked at htable before. I just looked at my sccs for it:

MRs:
COMMENTS:
date and time created 82/10/20 21:26:49 by sam

4.1     #ifndef lint
4.1     static char sccsid[] = "@(#)htable.c    4.1 (Berkeley) 10/20/82";
4.1     #endif
4.1     
4.1     /*
4.1      * htable - convert NIC host table into a UNIX format.
4.1      * NIC format is described in RFC 810, 1 March 1982.
4.1      */

I was hoping there was an early revision for previous format there, but 
that is the first revision I see in SCCS.

Thank you for reminding me and thanks for pointing me to gettable. I see 
that is a TCP client implementation of the RFC 811 NIC Internet 
Hostnames Server. Awesome. I will be writing about it.

Just noticed the long-obsolete manpage has an error; it says:

     Gettable is a simple program used to obtain the NIC standard host tables
     from a ``nicname'' server.
...
     Gettable operates by opening a TCP connection to the port indicated in
     the service specification for ``nicname''.

It is not a "nicname" client. It is a RFC 811 "hostnames" client.

The first code before 4.2BSD has:

        sp = getservbyname("nicname", "tcp");

The later code has:
        sp = getservbyname("hostnames", "tcp");

4.1c.2 /etc/services had:

nicname         101/tcp         hostname        # usually from sri-nic

4.2BSD /etc/services had:

whois           43/tcp          nicname

hostnames       101/tcp         hostname        # usually from sri-nic

nicname is RFC 812.

but the manpage never got fixed (well I didn't look after FreeBSD 1.0 
which is the newest version of gettable I have).

I was hoping that gettable(8) had HNAME/HADDR query commands then I 
think it would be a very early network name lookup tool. But it just 
had the ALL support to return entire host table.

Still looking for the pre RFC 810 tables from SRI-NIC ...