The use of underscores in hostnames

[Kevin Darcy]

Underscores are technically illegal in hostnames, for a number of
not-particularly-convincing reasons. Chapter and verse is RFC 1123,
Section 2.1 (incorporating by reference RFC 952, which excludes
underscore, _et_alia_, in the ASSUMPTIONS section, item 1). I guess
"nsupdate" enforces this restriction in some kind of clumsy way...

On the other hand, you didn't say what kind of DNS records these were.
Underscores _are_ legal in contexts other than hostnames (in SRV records,
for instance). So maybe this could be reported as a _bona_fide_ nsupdate
bug.


- Kevin

creedle76 at my-deja.com wrote:

> I am attempting to move my DSN from a solaris machine running bind
> 8.1.2 to a Linux box running 8.2.2-P5 and have discovered that existing
> records that have underscores "_" in the hostname screw the dynamic
> update up something awful.
> I would get NOTAUTH errors when trying to add records with nsupdate.
> This seemed to work fine on the 8.1.2 machine, is this something new?
> This was a bear to track down because I have quite a few records in my
> DNS and only 4 of them had underscores in them.
> As soon as I modified those 4 records, everything worked fine.
> Thanks for any help.