If you can find source for bind 4<= I'm sure it will compile and give you a working named. Getting the client side code cleanly would mean a later release of BSD but there are client side libs in the bind code AFAIK. You can possibly link against them for rational gethostbyname(). If the link loader ordering thing works, they might supercede simply by placing -lresolv before libc.

Bear in mind all the RR type richness postdated this time so you could be sent UDP > 512, and internal state you can't grok. But for A and PTR lookup it should be fine. Since it won't do TCP or DNSSEC or large packet EDNS0 signalling, I suspect a bit of dns flow inbound would be perplexing for the resolver.

On Sun, 30 Jan 2022, 8:13 am Warner Losh, <imp@bsdimp.com> wrote:

On Sat, Jan 29, 2022 at 2:49 PM 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?

DNS post-dates 4.3BSD. The first DNS RFC was published in Nov 1987. 4.3BSD was June 1986. The host table update was a thing, but my school was far enough off the beaten path that by the time we were on the internet, DNS was a thing...

Warner