From: "Ron Natalie" <ron@ronnatalie.com>
To: "The Unix Heritage Society" <tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org>
Cc: Internet History <internet-history@postel.org>
Subject: Re: [TUHS] [COFF] Pondering the hosts file
Date: Thu, 11 Mar 2021 20:32:52 +0000 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <em5f60e177-7e7c-45a5-9fbb-8901e7f8e77d@alien> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAC20D2NgRziycz+25N3NfM1Q49dBz0Owzx+xOn3J2+dYcihrNQ@mail.gmail.com>
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Which hosts table? The Berkeley one or the REAL internet one?
The Berkeley one (which I think may predate the IP implementation) is
the one that we know as /etc/hosts that has the address then the namees
of the hosts.
The "real" one is the one the NIC put out in the pre-domain days.
It's defined in RFC 952, looks like
HOST : 10.0.0.29 : BRL.ARPA, BRL : PDP-11/70 : UNIX : TCP :
There was also a simple TCP service that would serve up the file.
I detested the Berkeley one and we always downloaded and used the NIC
table on our machines. I rewrote "rhost" and it's successors
(gethostbyname, etc...) to read directly from the NIC format.
Amusingly one day we got an Imagen ethernet-connected laser printer.
Mike Muuss decided the thing should be named BRL-ZAP and since I didn't
know what to put down as the machine type, and it did have a 68000 in
it, I had Jake put 68000 in the entry in the host table.
The next day I got all kinds of hate mail from other BSD sites who
assumed I had intentionally sabotaged the host table. Apparently, the
BSD systems used a YACC grammar to parse the NIC table into the Berkeley
one. The only problem is they got the grammar wrong and assumed the
CPU type always began with a letter. There parse blew up on my "ZAP"
host and they assumed that was the desired effect.
I countered back that using a YACC grammar for this was rediculous.
There was already a real popular file on UNIX that had a bunch of fields
separated by colons and commas (/etc/passwd anybody) that it was never
necessary to use YACC to parse.
-Ron
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next prev parent reply other threads:[~2021-03-11 20:33 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 30+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2021-03-11 17:13 [TUHS] " Grant Taylor via TUHS
2021-03-11 17:29 ` [TUHS] [COFF] " Steffen Nurpmeso
2021-03-11 17:40 ` [TUHS] " Bakul Shah
2021-03-11 18:08 ` [TUHS] [COFF] " Warner Losh
2021-03-11 18:12 ` Clem Cole
2021-03-11 18:21 ` Jaap Akkerhuis
2021-03-11 18:21 ` Nelson H. F. Beebe
2021-03-11 20:05 ` Jan Schaumann
2021-03-11 20:30 ` Henry Bent
2021-03-11 20:42 ` Henry Bent
2021-03-11 21:20 ` Henry Bent
2021-03-11 23:46 ` Richard Salz
2021-03-12 1:15 ` Jeremy C. Reed
2021-03-12 3:27 ` George Michaelson
2021-03-11 20:44 ` Lars Brinkhoff
2021-03-11 21:05 ` Henry Bent
2021-03-12 5:53 ` Lars Brinkhoff
2021-03-11 21:12 ` Ron Natalie
2021-03-11 22:33 ` Jeremy C. Reed
2021-03-11 18:27 ` Henry Bent
2021-03-11 18:18 ` Henry Bent
2021-03-11 18:02 ` Clem Cole
2021-03-11 20:32 ` Ron Natalie [this message]
2021-03-11 21:02 ` Bakul Shah
2021-03-11 21:08 ` Ron Natalie
2021-03-11 21:15 ` Bakul Shah
2021-03-12 1:14 ` Mary Ann Horton
2021-03-11 21:20 ` Grant Taylor via TUHS
2021-03-11 18:30 Bakul Shah
2021-03-12 10:53 Paul Ruizendaal via TUHS
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