On Sat, 29 Jan 2022 at 16:49, 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?

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

-Henry