http://3505021947 is an invalid URL

[Wilder, Donald]

I read about this somewhere before in one of these newsgroups. 

The URL does indeed work. It is converted to an quad-dot IP address by the
IP stack to 208.234.99.251. I forget the math to do this...

Try an nslookup on either 208.234.99.251 or 3505021947 and you will get the
same address... www.freestation.com. 

Now... Whether or Not that follows the RFC's spirit is another story. ;-)
Bug? Feature? -- It's anyone's guess.

Donald E. Wilder
All views are the express opinion of the sender and in no way reflect the
"official" views of the GTE corporation.

> -----Original Message-----
> From:	Lawrence Chan [SMTP:webmaster at montevino.com]
> Sent:	Saturday, June 12, 1999 11:38 PM
> To:	bind-users at isc.org
> Cc:	comp-protocols-dns-bind at uunet.uu.net
> Subject:	Re: http://3505021947 is an invalid URL
> 
> Glen Turner wrote:
> > 
> > The definition of a URL only allows the dotted-quad form
> > of the IP address.
> > 
> > So it is perfectly valid for a browser or HTTP proxy to
> > reject the URL as invalid.
> > 
> > RFC1738 section 5 says:
> > 
> >   host           = hostname | hostnumber
> >   hostnumber     = digits "." digits "." digits "." digits
> > 
> >                -------------------------------
> > 
> > Most implementations hand <host> down to gethostbyname(),
> > if that fails they then try inet_addr().  inet_addr() allows
> > a lot of formats for the IP address.  This is actually
> > a really bad idea.  For example the strings:
> > 
> >   010.010.010.010
> > 
> > and
> > 
> >   10.10.10.10
> > 
> > are different addresses.  Some UNIXen are more restrictive
> > about the formats accepted by inet_addr() to solve the user
> > interface problems of the more generalised BSD implementation.
> > Compare DEC UNIX to Solaris.
> > 
> > Cheers,
> > glen
> > 
> > --
> >  Glen Turner                               Network Specialist
> >  Tel: (08) 8303 3936          Information Technology Services
> >  Fax: (08) 8303 4400         The University of Adelaide  5005
> >  Email: glen.turner at adelaide.edu.au           South Australia
> 
> Hello,
> 
> Somebody just showed me another interesting URL format which starts with
> a set of %dd, the d seems dec.  The URL comprises of 9 of these sets at
> the beginning followed by an @ and another 10 digits, also appear to be
> dec like:
> 
> %dd%dd%dd%dd%dd%dd%dd%dd%dd at dddddddddd
> 
> What would you think of that?  How does one find out who the URL belongs
> to?
> 
> Lawrence Chan
> lchan at montevino.com