30 Jan
2022
30 Jan
'22
4:08 a.m.
On Sat, 29 Jan 2022 at 16:56, Henry Bent <henry.r.bent(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Sat, 29 Jan 2022 at 16:49, Will Senn
<will.senn(a)gmail.com> wrote:
A quick search found me a site with an archive of the HOSTS.TXT files that
gettable and friends used: https://emaillab.jp/dns/hosts/
To give you an idea of how soon things were obsolete, the files from the
'90s have 132.162.32.243 listed as Oberlin's VAX 11/780 ocvaxa, a machine
that had not existed for many years at that point. The distributed nature
of DNS made things much, much easier to keep current.
-Henry
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?
gettable uses flat files to map names to numbers. It hasn't existed in
probably 30+ years, and I can't even imagine how large the files it creates
would be for the modern internet.
Amusingly, for some strange reason it still exists in Solaris 11.2:
https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E36784_01/html/E36871/gettable-1m.html