[TUHS] 4.3 BSD network name resolution

[Henry Bent]

On Sat, 29 Jan 2022 at 16:49, Will Senn <will.senn at 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
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