Message-ID: <19981026220029.A5640@deejai.mch.sni.de>
Date: Mon, 26 Oct 1998 22:00:29 +0100
From: Martin Kraemer <martin.kraemer@mch.sni.de>
To: new-httpd@apache.org
Subject: Re: Fully qualified names
References: <199810230017.RAA34410@scv4.apple.com>
 <199810231805.LAA05772@scv3.apple.com>
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 from Wilfredo Sanchez on Fri, Oct 23, 1998 at 11:05:40AM -0700
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On our company's intranet, only about half (or less) of the hosts do
actually have a registered DNS address (which makes sense, too, since
they couldn't connect to the internet directly anyway, and they're not
running a real OS which is capable of receiving mail addressed to
their host ;-).

Therefore I figure many intranets (like in schools) have the same
problem: the intranet hosts want to provide information, even though
they don't have a DNS address.

The solution I've been proposing to my "internal apache customers"
was to use an IP address in dotted quad notation, because that
probably is what these servers must be addressed like anyway (non NIS-
based name resolution).
It serves well enough for redirections, though it's ugly in
situations where your local (client) configuration was able to
address the server by a (locally known only) readable name.
But that's just the problem: how can the server know whether the clients
know it by a readable name?

Would a configuration like
    ServerName 123.45.67.89
    UseCanonicalName Off
help Apache to use the same name in redirections as the client was
using in the request?

Should "Make install" use the dotted-quad address if it finds no
DNS name by reverse lookup?

    Martin

On Fri, Oct 23, 1998 at 11:05:40AM -0700, Wilfredo Sanchez wrote:
> | I think that making people specify a ServerName in the odd case where
> | there is no qualified domain name is a better alternative than having
> | person after person complain that redirects don't work right.
> 
>   Yeah.  My problem is that it's not an odd case;  we hope to sell machines
> to schools--we like schools--so the teacher can set up apache right quick
> and get a classroom going with a web server for the kids to bang on.  It's
> not all that common, perhaps to use web servers on isolated nets, but we
> see some uses of that coming our way.
> 
>   Would a compile-time option be OK?
> 
>   I think that on my platform, I can make the default search order for lookups
> to do DNS first, then NetInfo and whatever else, for which Internet servers,
> which always (almost always?) use DNS, Apache will find the FQDN.
-- 
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