DNS NEWBIE

[Jim Reid]

>>>>> "David" == David Michaels <david.michaels at uc.edu> writes:

    David> Excuse me if this has been asked a million times... but why
    David> does Sun rename the binary to in.named? 

Because of ancient history. Once upon a time, BSD Unix systems had
discrete processes listening on sockets for things like ftp, telnet
and so on. When inetd was introduced, these executables got renamed to
in.ftpd, in.telnetd etc., just like they're known today. Initially
that was done so system administrators could tell the difference
between the old, standalone versions and the new ones that ran under
inetd.

For reasons best known to themselves, some vendors decided that named
should obey this naming convention for system daemon executables even
though the name server never ran under inetd. [Though there might have
been a brief flirtation with this in the days of BIND4.] Sun are still
doing following this naming convention.