dns and software, was Re: Reliable Cloud host ?

Tue Feb 28 00:07:26 UTC 2012

On Feb 27, 2012, at 3:50 PM, William Herrin wrote:

> On Mon, Feb 27, 2012 at 3:43 PM, david raistrick <drais at icantclick.org> wrote:
>> On Mon, 27 Feb 2012, William Herrin wrote:
>>> In some cases this is because of carelessness: The application does a
>>> gethostbyname once when it starts, grabs the first IP address in the
>>> list and retains it indefinitely. The gethostbyname function doesn't
>>> even pass the TTL to the application. Ntpd is/used to be one of the
>>> notable offenders, continuing to poll the dead address for years after
>>> the server moved.
>> 
>> While yes it often is carelessness - it's been reported by hardcore
>> development sorts that I trust that there is no standardized API to obtain
>> the TTL...  What needs to get fixed is get[hostbyname,addrinfo,etc] so
>> programmers have better tools.
> 
> Meh. What should be fixed is that connect() should receive a name
> instead of an IP address. Having an application deal directly with the
> IP address should be the exception rather than the rule. Then, deal
> with the TTL issues once in the standard libraries instead of
> repeatedly in every single application.
> 
> In theory, that'd even make the app code protocol agnostic so that it
> doesn't have to be rewritten yet again for IPv12.
> 

While I agree with the principle of what you are trying to say, I would argue
that it should be dealt with in getnameinfo() / getaddrinfo() and not connect().

It is perfectly reasonable for connect() to deal with an address structure.

If people are not using getnameinfo()/getaddrinfo() from the standard libraries,
then, I don't see any reason to believe that they would use connect() from the
standard libraries if it incorporated their functionality.

Owen