Shared libraries

[Chris Siebenmann]

mohta at necom830.cc.titech.ac.jp (Masataka Ohta) writes:
[About /etc/hosts-based IP lookups returning or not returning multiple
 IP addresses when such are listed for a given host in /etc/hosts:]
| It is not a bug. There is trade off. If multiple IP addresses are
| represented by a single hostname, you can't use a hostname to specify a
| specific IP address. For example, you can't "ifconfig" with a symbolic
| hostname.

 Perhaps I am handicapped by never having run a a real nameserver-only
4.3BSD system, but isn't using symbolic hostnames with a nameserver
based ifconfig dangerous or fatal? Presumably your interfaces and IP
addresses are not yet set at that point, which makes it hard to querry
nameservers.  You can always have aliases for specific interfaces; I
don't think the need to use nameserver A records instead of CNAMEs is
all that much of a hardship (or all that inelegant).

| Your two authentification related examples:
| >- things which use hostnames as the permission mechanism,
| >- Things which add permissions based on IPs got from hostname lookups;
| are not problems. It is avoided simply by registering all of hostnames
| in the authentification data.

 Registering all of the hostnames in the authentication data seems to
be equivalent (in this case) to requiring the users to name all the
interfaces (either by name or by IPs) when adding such data. Perhaps
you think this is a reasonable thing to require users to do; I don't. I
would much rather our users be completely shielded from how the network
looks today.

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