Re: 2.4amiga resolv.conf hints

[Niklas Hallqvist <niklas@appli.se>]

> From: Ulrich Flegel <Ulrich.Flegel@CS.Uni-Dortmund.DE>
> Date: 05 Jan 1999 16:27:46 +0100

> whoever is wondering why his machine takes way to long coming up while
> using
> 
> yp bind files
> 
> in resolv.conf while having no dns server around:
> 
> normally there  shouldn't be any information needed  for booting after
> plain  installation, which  is not  already  in the  /etc files.   But
> "files"  in  resolv.conf  specifically  only means  /etc/hosts.   When
> configuring the  multicast address (while booting) a  name is resolved
> which is not in /etc/hosts but /etc/networks. If you put the multicast
> base network address also in /etc/hosts, the timeouts will go away.

I might fill in a bit here, as it has been a pet peeve of mine and I
have analyzed the problem quite some time ago.  "files" does not only
mean /etc/hosts, but /etc/networks as well, however; when route(8)
does certain lookups of symbols it tries both hosts and networks via
first the gethostbyname(3) interface then getnetbyname(3).  This means
that the search order for such a lookup really is in case of
"file bind":

/etc/hosts DNS /etc/networks DNS

which of course causes delays at the first DNS phase if DNS is
unreachable and the symbolic address is in /etc/networks.  Personally
I think that route(8) should be rewritten to listen to the -host and
-net specifiers and explicitly do the *right* get*byname function.
We could keep the old semantics if -net or -host is not given though.
That way one can easily skip over this problem by adding the right
specifier.

This has actually been on my todo list but rather a long way down...

Niklas