Re: Getting Hosts to work.

[Anthony Dean <void@aynet.dyndns.org>]

> You represent the remaining 1%. What you are attempting to do is replace
> a NIS-based hosts database with an ldap based one. Its only possible
> justification would be, if that were to use it as a single reference for
> many hosts on a confined network, to make administration reasier. This
> is how people did things in the 1980s, until confined networks became
> today's Internet.
>  
The internet is just a large collection of confined networks, and as you 
noted there are times when it's easier to administer hosts in LDAP. 
Both Solaris and HP-UX seem to be moving this way.

> Today people use DNS. 
>  
It's a perfectly fine protocol.  Why do you think it matters what the 
database is actually stored in though?  A LDAP->DNS bridge is hardly 
magic or even complicated.

> man hosts
> cat /etc/hosts
> cat /etc/resolv.conf
> man resolver
> http://www.isc.org/products/BIND/
>  
http://www.nimh.org/code/ldapdns/
http://ldap2dns.tiscover.com/
http://www.openldap.org/

I don't think anyone is suggesting using LDAP to resolve names across 
the internet, but on individual confined networks it works fine and 
makes a lot of sense.  I've got more servers than I care to think about 
that will _never_ get any sort of connection from the internet, let 
alone a DNS query.

I really like like the idea of every machine on my network having a 
detailed directory entry with useful information, and why should I then 
duplicate hostname and IP address into another database?

Anthony