Underscore Character

[Barry Margolin]

In article <383197B8.B8ECDE69 at daimlerchrysler.com>,
Kevin Darcy  <kcd at daimlerchrysler.com> wrote:
>Or are you saying every device in the network which wants to connect *to* that
>device should be enforcing RFC compliance for every connection attempt?
>That would
>appear to me to be a function of the resolver library, which is often ported
>fairly directly from the BIND distribution. So the OS vendors would most likely
>just pass the complaints on to ISC.

Anyone remember MacTCP 2.0.4 (or maybe it was 2.0.6)?  Its resolver library
(not derived from BIND, AFAIK) rejected names that didn't conform to the
RFC, so suddenly lots of Macintosh users couldn't connect to hosts with
underscores.

Apple probably thought they were applying the "be conservative in what you
send" half of the Interoperability Principle, by not sending DNS queries
that contained invalid hostnames.  But actually they were violating the "be
liberal in what you accept" part, since the user supplying the name is not
generally the source of the data, the remote domain administrator is.  But
those domain administrators are clearly violating the Principle.

-- 
Barry Margolin, barmar at bbnplanet.com
GTE Internetworking, Powered by BBN, Burlington, MA
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