On Fri, 2009-07-10 at 10:00 -0400, Sowmini.Varadhan at Sun.COM wrote: > On (07/10/09 09:53), Sebastien Roy wrote: > > > > This doesn't bolster either viewpoint, but an observation: I certainly > > hope that DNS is not the recommended name service for addresses to be > > configured on the system. /etc/hosts is the only viable place for those > > name->address mappings for obvious reasons. > > true, but the library does not have control over the search order > for the resolver. Morever, there's no API today to say "search /etc/hosts > only" (other than doing something gross like parsing the file itself :-()
Right. > > Also, even in /etc/hosts or /etc/ipnodes, you could > validly have multiple entries for the same hostname. That's right, which is why I think DNS is irrelevant to the discussion. The fact is that hostnames can resolve to multiple addresses. The documentation can simply state that if you use hostnames, you should make sure that you know what you're doing and that you're getting the address that you want because the tool will pick one of potentially multiple addresses returned. -Seb
