:For some years I have been using patched utilities under SunOS to show
:full host names in the output from the 'who', 'finger', and 'last'
:commands. (Traditional UNIXes truncate host names to about 16
:characters.)
:
:I have been thinking of patching FreeBSD programs to do the same, but
:since I have been updating my source tree often, it will be a bit
:painful to maintain my changes through the updates. So I will do it
:only if the FreeBSD developers would be willing to incorporate my
:changes into the official FreeBSD source tree. Below is what I would
:do -- tell me if it could be make a part of FreeBSD.
:
:- Update all programs that write to utmp and wtmp to check the host name
: length, and if it's too long, insert the IP address instead
:- Update all of the above programs, if they accept a host name on the
: command line, to also accept an additional argument that specifies
: the IP address.
:- Update all programs that invoke the above programs and supply a
: host name to also supply the IP address.
:- Update all programs that look up wtmp and utmp such that, if they find
: an IP address, they do a double-reverse DNS resolution (IP address ->
: fqdn -> IP address) and, if successful and consistent, display the
: host name instead of the IP address. The user may if he wishes supply
: a command-line argument to suppress the reverse resolution and cause
: the IP address to be displayed directly.
This sounds just dandy. Note that 'w' already does a reverse lookup,
but not a double-reverse.
For some programs, like 'last', it is not convenient to do the DNS lookup
by default - in this case you would want to supply an option to 'last' to
make it do the lookups. The reason you do not want to do it by default
with 'last' is that wtmp can be huge and many people run 'last' output
through greps from cron and expect it to not take forever.
As long as we don't mess with the size of the utmp or wtmp structure,
which by the above I believe you mean to say that we don't... then I'm
all for it!
-Matt
Matthew Dillon
<dil...@backplane.com>
To Unsubscribe: send mail to majord...@freebsd.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
