Re: Were A record domain names ever limited to 23 characters?

[Joe Hamelin <joe () nethead com>]

On Fri, Oct 7, 2011 at 8:25 PM, Owen DeLong <owen () delong com> wrote:
> Yes, this was because some very old (current at the time, however)
> implementations of gethostbyname(3) were implemented in such a way that if
> the first character they saw returned isdigit()==TRUE, then,
> they would assume that they had been passed an IP address
> and would attempt to encode the string as an IP address rather
> than looking it up in /etc/hosts or DNS.

Now I'm going to have to look at the current gethostbyname(3) and see what
happens if we ever get a tld that is a decimal number under 255.  Yet
another reason for IPv6.

--
Joe Hamelin, W7COM, Tulalip, WA, 360-474-7474