Isn't time wonderful ..... 4.2 and 4.3BSD predates the release of bind, which was separately sent into the wild..

The good news is that you can certainly get things working with a static host table. And frankly for a simulated system, the network is likely to be very small and you are unlikely to need more modern services like a browser with URLs et al. That said, the early bind will work on 4.2/4.3 without a lot of hassle, as that's the system that it was developed. Except ..... the problem is the >>client side<< is used all over the place AND that needs to know you a DNS.

My suggestion is getting 4.3 running up with a very small (static) host table. Then take on the DNS. The resolv library (client code) is likely to have a lot of static calls to the old (non-DNS based) versions of gethostbyXXX and the like. If you bring bind over, you'r probably going to have to do a full rebuild and relink , reinstall of applications space clients use the DNS, not the static tables.

Have fun.

Clem

On Sat, Jan 29, 2022 at 4:49 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?

Will

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