7 Nov
2018
7 Nov
'18
4:52 p.m.
On Wed, Nov 7, 2018 at 3:38 AM <arnold(a)skeeve.com> wrote:
I'm not sure what you're asking. When DNS
came along, it became
a matter of editing /etc/nsswitch.conf to include dns as one of the
options along with files and yp/nis.
This does not align with my memory at all. I was at udel until 1988
and we started dealing with dns ca. 1986, and the shared library stuff
I dealt with in sunos came later.
Was there really an nsswitch.conf before 1988 that used shared
libraries? When did you first see nsswitch.conf? I first saw the
shared libraries with sunos 4.0 when I moved to super.org in 1988. I
always thought it started with them on Unix anyway.
In any event, dns was in some ways a big improvement in life. We were
ftp'ing the 256KiB host file from prep frequently (along with many)
and the load on prep, evidently, was getting high.
And a linear search of a 256KiB hosts file for every single
gethostbyname was getting ... noticeable. I assume this is part of why
stayopen was an option in the library.
People got upset about some things with DNS: "it's called prep, not
prep.ai.mit.edu, what is this nonsense?"
But we adjusted.