[TUHS] 4.3 BSD network name resolution

[Theodore Y. Ts'o]

On Sat, Jan 29, 2022 at 05:08:32PM -0500, Henry Bent wrote:
> > 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.

This brings back memories.

Way back when I was on the MIT Network Group[1], I wrote a program
which translated a file in HOSTS.TXT format into a DNS zone file for
BIND, since originally the HOSTS.TXT format file (stored in RCS for
source control) was the source of truth for IP address assignments at
MIT.  Later on, the authoratative source was the Moira[2] server,
which stored the information in an Oracle database, but the nightly
extract from the database was still done in a HOSTS.TXT format, which
then got translated into a zone file and distributed to MIT's DNS
servers.

It's quite possible, Moira DCM extract to the HOSTS.TXT file is still
in use today; MIT is still using Moira, although there is a web front
end that I suspect most of the admins are using these days, instead of
the CLI or Curses interfaces.  (The hard core Moira admins or
developers would occasionally need to do surgery by accessing the
Oracle database directly; that's how I first learned SQL.  :-)

[1] http://web.mit.edu/afs/net.mit.edu/admin/www/network/group.html
[2] http://kb.mit.edu/confluence/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=3902604

						- Ted