Underscores in host names

Roger Marquis marquis at roble.com
Thu May 19 15:52:56 UTC 2005


On Thu, 19 May 2005 Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu wrote:
> On Thu, 19 May 2005 08:04:31 PDT, Roger Marquis said:
>> Laurent Frigault wrote:
>>> gethostbyaddr (and may be other functions) will return NULL under at
>>> least FreeBSD/NetBSD for ANY PTR having the "_" character.
>>
>> As it should.  I wish it would also return a null for hostnames
>> containing sequential non-alphanumerics (--, ---, __, ___, ...).
>
> Don't like RFC3490 and its xn-- hostnames? ;)

Most definitely not, and if this were 1985 I'd be {rf}commenting on
the inadvisability of such hostnames, and those beginning or ending
with "-", TLD names shorter than 2 or longer than 4 characters,
spaces in hostnames, [^a-z0-9\\-\\.], and other such marginally
useful but infinitely problematic features.

There is real value in KIS, and not just from the perspective of a
security-minded coder...

-- 
Roger Marquis
Roble Systems Consulting
http://www.roble.com/



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