Resolver Issues (non valid hostname characters)

[Terry Lambert]

David J Duchscher wrote:
> On Tuesday, March 25, 2003, at 05:03  AM, Terry Lambert wrote:
> 
> > It's probably not very useful to talk about doing this until
> > local caching-only name servers on border servers are capable
> > of handling the 8-bit, as well.  For the RFC's that FreeBSD
> > currently complies with, it's right to be strict about this.
> 
> I think this is the wrong approach to take with this problem.
> Linux, Windows, and Solaris do not enforce this restriction. If
> RFC 952 is being thrown out the window, then why should FreeBSD
> continue to enforce this restriction? At the moment, the
> problems I am seeing have little to do with 8-bit data but
> characters outside of the what RFC 952 allows.

RFC 952 is in effect until a subsequent standards track RFC is
in effect.  Just because Linux allows you to specif host names
that break other machines, doesn't mean FreeBSD should.

"If your friends OS jumped off a cliff...?"

This is not that hard to understand: if FreeBSD is going to need
to (effectively) rewrite the resolver code, it should be done
once, not hundreds of times.  It is an expensive proposition.

If you want to provide a patch that allows this behaviour to be
optional in the FreeBSD resolver, through the use of an "xrfc952"
option in the /etc/resolv.conf file, I invite you to submit code.

-- Terry