dns and software, was Re: Reliable Cloud host ?

Mon Feb 27 20:42:07 UTC 2012

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.

--
david raistrick        http://www.netmeister.org/news/learn2quote.html
drais at icantclick.org             http://www.expita.com/nomime.html