Re: Local address lookup (SOLVED!)

[Jan Willem Stumpel <jstumpel@planet.nl>]

I found the answer to the question why telnet to a local machine 
involves the DNS in the outside world.

The version of telnet which comes with woody apparently does *not* 
do a straightforward gethostbyname(). What it *does* do, I do not 
know because I haven't looked at the source. But I did make a 
small test program with gethostbyname() and that does not call the 
outside DNS for local addresses.

However it *is* possible to avoid DNS lookup with telnet if you 
use the option -4, which forces IPv4 address resolution. So now I 
made telnet -4 an alias for telnet. Maybe this will lead to 
problems later on, but so far it works fine. In particular, there
is no delay in telnetting to a local box when the Internet 
connection is down.

I wonder if this (to me) unexpected behaviour of telnet should be 
counted as a bug (to be reported), or as a feature.

Regards, Jan