19 Apr
2019
19 Apr
'19
1:54 a.m.
This email is two parts. I am researching 1970's symbolic name to
network address mapping routines.
1) I am looking for parsers for ancient (pre mid 1982) HOSTS.TXT. Since
this is Unix list, for Unix is fine :)
RFC 597 (12 December 1973) says a hostname list will be maintained at
the NIC with the location to be announced. (Interestingly NIC as in
FEINLER@NIC is probably a nickname as it is not listed in the host
status list. I am guessing it is a nickname for SRI-ARC or OFFICE-1.)
RFC 606 (December 1973) says there are different hosts lists, but "now"
there is "the official list of host names". It proposed that it should
be maintained online in machine-readable form. It proposes a format and
suggested attributes.
RFC 607 (January 10, 1974) the NIC agrees that NIC maintain a text file
of hostnames, addresses, and attributes. (It has also been suggested
separately.) The source is maintained in NLS format with multiple
attributes. (What is this NLS format?) A program could be written to
generate a weekly ASCII file. They will write the program and the
generated file will be at OFFICE-1 (IMP #43?) with pathname of
<NETINFO>HOSTS.TXT (It's not Unix. It's TENEX I think. The
">" is the
directory delimiter, but what is "<"?)
I have found a few copies of a hostname table, like
https://emaillab.jp/pub/hosts/1974/host_names_1974.pdf and
https://www.bortzmeyer.org/files/hosts.txt-1982-1.pdf But these don't
appear to be the machine parseable files as defined in the RFC 608
format. These are just printed formats. (I have also found many of the
host status reports.)
Well I cannot find a copy of the HOSTS.TXT file anywhere. I am not
looking for the RFC 810 (1 March 1982) or later format (which is easily
found).
http://pdp-10.trailing-edge.com/SRI_NIC_PERM_SRC_3_19910112/01/utility/ps-p…
may have copies of it (old format is OHOSTS.TXT). But I cannot figure
out if or where there are individual file downloads there. Any ideas?)
That leads me to my question ... does anyone know where parser code for
the HOSTS.TXT file is at?
2) I skimmed through some C code (for Unix) for sendmsg, mmdf, srvrftp,
mailer.c, telnet.c that use /dev/net/ followed by up to 14-character
hostname. I am trying to find the kernel code or routines that enable
device driver named with a hostname. Any ideas? (In particular I'd like
to know how those names map to a remote host's address.)
I am researching 1970's symbolic name to network address mapping
routines, but the only ones I have found are primitive: Purdue's "modest
UNIX network" using mx and Berkeley's Berknet (single letter hostnames).
But both use simple compiled-in name-to-address tables. (The Purdue
implementation looks interesting as it has some design to connect
between IMPs too, but I don't see any code for finding IMP numbers via
names. By the way, their "csh" tool was their "connected shell" to run
a
shell on a remote host. The manual had the list of hostnames in it. See
the Purdue usenix tape.)
Thanks,
Jeremy C. Reed
echo 'EhZ[h ^jjf0%%h[[Zc[Z_W$d[j%Xeeai%ZW[ced#]dk#f[d]k_d%' | \
tr '#-~' '\-.-{'
19 Apr
19 Apr
2:38 a.m.
Can't help on the main thrust of this, but can answer one question...
On Thu, Apr 18, 2019 at 8:33 PM <reed(a)reedmedia.net> wrote:
This email is two parts. I am researching 1970's
symbolic name to
network address mapping routines.
1) I am looking for parsers for ancient (pre mid 1982) HOSTS.TXT. Since
this is Unix list, for Unix is fine :)
RFC 597 (12 December 1973) says a hostname list will be maintained at
the NIC with the location to be announced. (Interestingly NIC as in
FEINLER@NIC is probably a nickname as it is not listed in the host
status list. I am guessing it is a nickname for SRI-ARC or OFFICE-1.)
NIC is probably what became know as SRI-NIC in latter days. By the time I
joined the internet in the early 80s, SRI-NIC was where you registered your
domain name. I just missed the hostfile by a few years.
RFC 607 (January 10, 1974) the NIC agrees that NIC
maintain a text file
of hostnames, addresses, and attributes. (It has also been suggested
separately.) The source is maintained in NLS format with multiple
attributes. (What is this NLS format?) A program could be written to
generate a weekly ASCII file. They will write the program and the
generated file will be at OFFICE-1 (IMP #43?) with pathname of
<NETINFO>HOSTS.TXT (It's not Unix. It's TENEX I think. The
">" is the
directory delimiter, but what is "<"?)
It's TENEX or TOPS-20 (they are the same for this purpose). <DIR>FILE.EXT
was the format. This was later extended to <DIR.SUB>FILE.EXT. So the <>
just contain the whole path, separated by dots.
Warner
4:03 a.m.
reed wrote:
I am researching 1970's symbolic name to network
address mapping
routines. I am looking for parsers for ancient (pre mid 1982)
HOSTS.TXT. Since this is Unix list, for Unix is fine :)
I have those routines and parsers for the PDP-10 ITS operating system.
(I will just post this one off-topic message in this thread.)
Well I cannot find a copy of the HOSTS.TXT file
anywhere. I am not
looking for the RFC 810 (1 March 1982) or later format (which is
easily found).
Here is a collection, but most of them are from after that date.
https://github.com/ttkzw/hosts.txt
I was thinking SAIL must have had something, but I don't see any hosts
list from the 70s here:
https://www.saildart.org/[*,NET]
11:57 a.m.
Amusing thing on parsers. I had written a short C subroutine to eat HOSTS.TXT directly
which we used rather than the Berkeley /etc/hosts format.
It presented the same interface to the caller as the Berkeley one.
We found out that when we added a host with a type "68000" that we suddenly
broke every straight BSD system. Apparently, they used a YACC grammar to parse HOSTS.TXT
into /etc/hosts and had screwed it up assuming the machine type field (like the hostname)
had to begin with a letter. It didn't help that the machine we added was named
"BRL-ZAP." There was some discussion that we had done this intentionally.
I pointed out that a YACC grammar was way overkill and there must be some existing file on
UNIX that has fields separated by colons that there was simpler stuff written to parse 😊
Anyhow, for expedience Jake just added an "MC" on to the machine type to
appease the Berkeley toadies.
There was a protocol defined to download the host file which we ran nighly .
6:43 p.m.
On Thu, Apr 18, 2019 at 10:33 PM <reed(a)reedmedia.net> wrote:
This email is two parts. I am researching 1970's
symbolic name to
network address mapping routines.
1) I am looking for parsers for ancient (pre mid 1982) HOSTS.TXT. Since
this is Unix list, for Unix is fine :)
Got to Warren's archives for BSD 4.2 and look for the htable(8) and
gettable(8). I believe the parsing routines will be in htable(8).
ᐧ
6:54 p.m.
Just saw Ron reply, I remember when that happened - (it could have been you
guys) but after we sold our first Masscomp machine to DoD. We then added a
note in the administrator's guide we saying use MC68000 and that was the
reason.
As Ron said, getting the latest from the NIC was standard, gettable(8) was
often the way you did it. We have a script on the Masscomp systems called
getmasterhost IIRC that was a little more programmable because so many
customers were not yet on the Internet, most were not yet running BIND or
the equivalent and kept a static master table some where (and we must have
taught them how to so that in the System Managers' guide).
ᐧ
On Fri, Apr 19, 2019 at 2:43 PM Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
On Thu, Apr 18, 2019 at 10:33 PM <reed(a)reedmedia.net> wrote:
This email is two parts. I am researching
1970's symbolic name to
network address mapping routines.
1) I am looking for parsers for ancient (pre mid 1982) HOSTS.TXT. Since
this is Unix list, for Unix is fine :)
Got to Warren's archives for BSD 4.2 and look for the htable(8) and
gettable(8). I believe the parsing routines will be in htable(8).
ᐧ
9:52 p.m.
Replying to two messages here:
On Fri, 19 Apr 2019, Lars Brinkhoff wrote:
Here is a collection, but most of them are from after
that date.
https://github.com/ttkzw/hosts.txt
Thanks. I should have mentioned I looked there. It doesn't have it as
far as I see. It has the same data for the pre-1982 files I already
have (but they are not RFC 608 style).
But it was interesting to see the three MIT/Stanford versions. I think
they have a different format unless I misunderstand. Since I cannot find
SRI-NIC examples (before RFC 810) I don't know for sure.
https://github.com/ttkzw/hosts.txt/blob/master/pub/hosts/19830119/HOSTS.TXT
If you can point me to PDP-10 ITS routines, I'd appreciate it.
On Fri, 19 Apr 2019, Clem Cole wrote:
1) I am looking for parsers for ancient (pre mid
1982)
...
Got to Warren's archives for BSD 4.2 and look for
the htable(8) and
gettable(8).? I believe the parsing routines will be in htable(8).
Thanks. I have them already (including 4.1c.2). They are the newer
format. I had looked at htable before. I just looked at my sccs for it:
MRs:
COMMENTS:
date and time created 82/10/20 21:26:49 by sam
4.1 #ifndef lint
4.1 static char sccsid[] = "(a)(#)htable.c 4.1 (Berkeley) 10/20/82";
4.1 #endif
4.1
4.1 /*
4.1 * htable - convert NIC host table into a UNIX format.
4.1 * NIC format is described in RFC 810, 1 March 1982.
4.1 */
I was hoping there was an early revision for previous format there, but
that is the first revision I see in SCCS.
Thank you for reminding me and thanks for pointing me to gettable. I see
that is a TCP client implementation of the RFC 811 NIC Internet
Hostnames Server. Awesome. I will be writing about it.
Just noticed the long-obsolete manpage has an error; it says:
Gettable is a simple program used to obtain the NIC standard host tables
from a ``nicname'' server.
...
Gettable operates by opening a TCP connection to the port indicated in
the service specification for ``nicname''.
It is not a "nicname" client. It is a RFC 811 "hostnames" client.
The first code before 4.2BSD has:
sp = getservbyname("nicname", "tcp");
The later code has:
sp = getservbyname("hostnames", "tcp");
4.1c.2 /etc/services had:
nicname 101/tcp hostname # usually from sri-nic
4.2BSD /etc/services had:
whois 43/tcp nicname
hostnames 101/tcp hostname # usually from sri-nic
nicname is RFC 812.
but the manpage never got fixed (well I didn't look after FreeBSD 1.0
which is the newest version of gettable I have).
I was hoping that gettable(8) had HNAME/HADDR query commands then I
think it would be a very early network name lookup tool. But it just
had the ALL support to return entire host table.
Still looking for the pre RFC 810 tables from SRI-NIC ...
10:50 p.m.
Frankly, I don't remember what Rob did but you might want to poke around
the BBN archives too which Warren should also have. Gurwitz might have
written something before the UCB code came about that used ftp. At CMU we
used rsync between the UNIX boxes for files like the host table, (that
where rsync was originally written for those that's don't know); but how it
was kept up to date from the 10's -- I don't remember. As Lars said, MIT
would have used ITS as its master before the DNS was birthed, but how the
UNIX boxes got it from there is unknown to me [Noel do you know?].
Clem
ᐧ
ᐧ
On Fri, Apr 19, 2019 at 5:53 PM <reed(a)reedmedia.net> wrote:
Replying to two messages here:
On Fri, 19 Apr 2019, Lars Brinkhoff wrote:
Here is a collection, but most of them are from
after that date.
https://github.com/ttkzw/hosts.txt
Thanks. I should have mentioned I looked there. It doesn't have it as
far as I see. It has the same data for the pre-1982 files I already
have (but they are not RFC 608 style).
But it was interesting to see the three MIT/Stanford versions. I think
they have a different format unless I misunderstand. Since I cannot find
SRI-NIC examples (before RFC 810) I don't know for sure.
https://github.com/ttkzw/hosts.txt/blob/master/pub/hosts/19830119/HOSTS.TXT
If you can point me to PDP-10 ITS routines, I'd appreciate it.
On Fri, 19 Apr 2019, Clem Cole wrote:
1) I am looking for parsers for ancient
(pre mid 1982)
...
Got to Warren's archives for BSD 4.2 and
look for the htable(8) and
gettable(8).? I believe the parsing routines will be in htable(8).
Thanks. I have them already (including 4.1c.2). They are the newer
format. I had looked at htable before. I just looked at my sccs for it:
MRs:
COMMENTS:
date and time created 82/10/20 21:26:49 by sam
4.1 #ifndef lint
4.1 static char sccsid[] = "(a)(#)htable.c 4.1 (Berkeley) 10/20/82";
4.1 #endif
4.1
4.1 /*
4.1 * htable - convert NIC host table into a UNIX format.
4.1 * NIC format is described in RFC 810, 1 March 1982.
4.1 */
I was hoping there was an early revision for previous format there, but
that is the first revision I see in SCCS.
Thank you for reminding me and thanks for pointing me to gettable. I see
that is a TCP client implementation of the RFC 811 NIC Internet
Hostnames Server. Awesome. I will be writing about it.
Just noticed the long-obsolete manpage has an error; it says:
Gettable is a simple program used to obtain the NIC standard host
tables
from a ``nicname'' server.
...
Gettable operates by opening a TCP connection to the port indicated in
the service specification for ``nicname''.
It is not a "nicname" client. It is a RFC 811 "hostnames" client.
The first code before 4.2BSD has:
sp = getservbyname("nicname", "tcp");
The later code has:
sp = getservbyname("hostnames", "tcp");
4.1c.2 /etc/services had:
nicname 101/tcp hostname # usually from sri-nic
4.2BSD /etc/services had:
whois 43/tcp nicname
hostnames 101/tcp hostname # usually from sri-nic
nicname is RFC 812.
but the manpage never got fixed (well I didn't look after FreeBSD 1.0
which is the newest version of gettable I have).
I was hoping that gettable(8) had HNAME/HADDR query commands then I
think it would be a very early network name lookup tool. But it just
had the ALL support to return entire host table.
Still looking for the pre RFC 810 tables from SRI-NIC ...
1836
days inactive
1836
days old
7 comments
5 participants
participants (5)
-
Clem Cole -
Lars Brinkhoff -
reed＠reedmedia.net -
ron＠ronnatalie.com -
Warner Losh