On Wed, 7 Nov 2018 at 14:57, Dan Cross <crossd(a)gmail.com> wrote:
This doesn't mesh with my memory. I recall building BIND from source and
having to rebuild network programs (e.g. on 4.3 on the RT or VAXen) to pick
up the new version of libresolv.a, and hacking the resolver library into
libc.so on Suns. I remember using resolv.conf fairly early on, but my
memory is that nsswitch.conf came later (Solaris 2.x era?). Ultrix did have
a configuration file for where to do host lookups, but I think the set of
sources was fixed: files, NIS or DNS. This would have been in the Ultrix
4.4 or 4.5 era on MIPS. I remember seeing some description of a
configuration file accompanied by an editorialized comment saying something
like, "this is an idea that's time has come: Ultrix has had it for several
years." The dig on uglix was, well, kind of funny (I had a DECstation at
home at the time).
Ultrix 4.0 (1990) had /etc/svc.conf for controlling distributed service
lookups, and you are correct that the only options were local, yp, and
bind. Ultrix 3 (1988) had /etc/svcorder which was much more limited, only
allowing for setting the order of host lookups, but it did have support for
resolv.conf and BIND lookups (which still works!).
-Henry