John Skelton writes:
> Wow!!, if I knew only 'alf of wot yer discussing I'd be impressed,
> thank god your on our side, I just 'ope you can iron out the problem
> so we can all be seriously smooooooth :-)

A small test program that demonstrates the problem is now in the hands of the
CSY networking folks.

I did some grep-ing of the BIND/iX source to determine the extent of the
code affected by this problem, and the trouble spots appear to be:

1) all of the clients in bin/
2) anything linked with the res_xxx() functions in libbind.a
3) anything linked with the gethostxxx() functions in libbind.a
4) dynamic update

Dynamic update is probably a lost cause unless HP decides to fix the problem.
The other things can be made to work OK if you keep the following in mind
when implementing BIND/iX:

1) In /etc/resolv.conf -> RESLVCNF.NET.SYS, make the first nameserver entry
point to BIND/iX.  But also include a second nameserver entry pointing to some
external nameserver other than BIND/iX.  It's good practice to do this anyway,
because it ensures your system can still resolve host names if BIND/iX isn't
running for some reason.

2) When defining master zones to be hosted by BIND/iX, make sure you also slave
them to one or more external nameservers other than BIND/iX.  In the USA, the
InterNIC requires multiple nameservers for top-level domains, i.e. "cccd.edu",
and if you're slaving your top level, you're probably also slaving your lower
levels.  You would want to do this anyway in a real-life production envrionment.

If you've done both of the above things, the only impact of this POSIX problem
will be that BIND/iX will fail when it tries to query the local server, and
will then try querying an external server, which will succeed.

You will only run into trouble when trying to resolve hostnames in a zone
contained on a single nameserver with no slaves (highly unlikely, IMO, but I
suppose there could be newbie Internet sites that aren't slaving because they
don't know any better).
--
Mark Bixby                      E-mail: [log in to unmask]
Coast Community College Dist.   Web: http://www.cccd.edu/~markb/
District Information Services   1370 Adams Ave, Costa Mesa, CA, USA 92626-5429
Technical Support               +1 714 438-4647
"You can tune a file system, but you can't tune a fish." - tunefs(1M)