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Re: glibc's getaddrinfo() sort order



Pierre Habouzit wrote:
>   The point is, there is an RFC, and we put a patch so that admins can
> disable it using gai.conf.

"There is an RFC" is not always a good excuse for breaking existing systems.

"Admins can disable it" is not a good argument when one common class of
the breakage is all the systems that _don't_ disable it hammering
systems that have round-robins set up to distribute load. More
generally, "we added an option so your bug is fixed" is a common
fallacy.

>   Note also that old calls like gethostbyname still return address
> randomly. It's somehow accepted that people using getaddrinfo should be
> aware of the RFC requirements wrt orderings, and that applications for
> whose DNS resolutions round robins may matter should implement their own
> randomization.

getaddrinfo was around for many years before RFC 3484. It's been in
glibc since 1996. So you're saying that developers writing code in
the 90's should have somehow been aware of an RFC that was published in
2003.


BTW, I'm seeing some programs that use getaddrinfo and still don't have
the RFC 3484 sorting behavior. Is this controlled by the AI_ADDRCONFIG flag?

-- 
see shy jo

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