PR bin/157732

[Christopher J. Ruwe]

In reaction to PR bin/157732
(http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=bin/157732) I am
investigating why traceroute does not trace hostnames greater in length
than 64 chars. It turned out that a limit of 64 chars is coded into
traceroute.c. From RFC2181
(http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2181#section-11) follows that a limit
of 254 chars needs to be supported by software conforming to standard.

traceroute calls gethostbyname(). It would be easiest (and results in a working program, I tried) to remove the part which checks against the limit of 64 chars completely. Another option would be to check against 254 chars.

Now, I try to investigate  whether removing the check altogether would result in any harmful effects in gethostbyname() or other functions. I have not found any possibilites of gethostbyname() buffer-overflowing. I consider my abilities readning and coding C beginner-level, so I am not sure and asking about opinions. Am I turning to the right forum with my request or should I post somewhere else?

Thanks for your input, cheers
-- 
Christopher J. Ruwe
TZ GMT + 2