Weird Problem

[Smith, William E. (Bill), Jr.]

One of our desktop support personnel contacted me to state that some of
their users were having problems with a  particular application working
correctly.  When I inquired for details, I was told that the application
relied on host names being resolved in lowercase format.  i.e
BILL.jhuapl.edu as opposed to bill.jhuapl.edu.  My first impression was to
say that an application that relies on this is a not a well written one
since DNS doesn't care(at least when using nslookup) whether the host is in
uppercase, lowercase or a mixture of both.  To see what the user was
referring to, I asked for an example.  I'm providing the output of a lookup
by hostname and IP.  When doing via IP it returns the hostname in caps for
whatever reason.  The client in question here is NT4.  This problem seems be
consistent across NT 4 clients. When I lookup on some W2K clients, I don't
see this behavior.  When I look at the zone file the host is in lowercase.
I'm kinda baffled by this one but I'm still of the opinion that an
application shouldn't be dependent on the case of a hostname.  Running third
party dns(bind 8.2.2P7 equivalent) on primary and 8.2.3 on secondaries.  Has
anyone see this behavior before? Any insight would be appreciated

Thanks,

Bill

Name:    brudide1.jhuapl.edu
Address:  128.244.54.149

> 128.244.54.149
Server:  apldns1.jhuapl.edu
Address:  128.244.197.32

Name:    BRUDIDE1.jhuapl.edu
Address:  128.244.54.149