Why was nslookup removed from FreeBSD 10?
Frank Leonhardt
frank2 at fjl.co.uk
Mon Jan 27 12:50:49 UTC 2014
On 27/01/2014 04:22, Darren Pilgrim wrote:
> On 1/26/2014 6:20 AM, Julian H. Stacey wrote:
>> The rationale for bind removal from src/ I thought ill advised; it won't
>> suprise me if FreeBSD gets roasted for no longer being net server ready.
>
> The irony being that if you were at all serious about running mail,
> DNS, NTP, etc., you used a port because the in-base versions were old
> and could not be easily upgraded in the event of security problems.
> This is one of many points made during the discussion on removing BIND
> from the base.
Ah, but American's don't do irony.
I'm never going to steer this away from BIND and back to nslookup, and
if you can't beat'em...
I think you're quite correct in pointing this out. The argument for
keeping BIND as part of the base system is similar to the argument for
including Apache or Samba. If you're running a server you're probably
going to need one or other, or both; probably more than BIND. And while
we're at it, how about replacing imapd and qpopper (anyone for a REAL
security problem???) with Dovecot, and ftpd with PureFTP and....
So I'm actually okay with installing BIND from ports, as long as it works.
But these are all services. nslookup is a utility, normally found in
/usr/bin (not /usr/local...). It's the only utility to have been removed
from the system binary directories. I don't know if this is written
somewhere in blood, but I've spent the last 30 years assuming anything
in /bin and /usr/bin is going to be safe to use in scripts because it
will always be there. I reckon history is on my side here!
Sendmail could be considered a bit dated too. Will that be next? If so,
with "... | mail root" still work?
Regards, Frank.
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