Re: hesiod

[David Z Maze <dmaze@debian.org>]

Tom Allison <tallison@tacocat.net> writes:
>  From what I can gather on this hesiod library, it's a dependency of
>  zephyr which comes from a dependency from cyrus21 (unstable).

No, it's an intrinsic dependency of zephyr.  In particular, zephyr can
use it to find the zephyr servers when the host manager starts up; if
you actually have this installed, 'hesinfo zephyr sloc' will give you
the names of the servers.  zhm(8) suggests that it only does this if
there are no command-line arguments to zhm, or in the case of Debian
zephyr, that zhm_args is empty in /etc/default/zephyr-clients.

> If I don't use Kerberos, how do I *not* install yet another DNS server?
>
> And could someone please explain what this does that regular Bind 9
> doesn't do.. why do I need it?

AFAIK a Hesiod server is a perfectly normal DNS server; it just serves
specially formatted txt records.  Try, for example, 'dig -t txt
zephyr.sloc.ns.athena.mit.edu'.  There are a couple of examples in
/usr/share/doc/libhesiod0/README.  Using Hesiod with zephyr is
orthogonal from using Kerberos; MIT uses both, but I've also used
zephyr in installations with neither.

-- 
David Maze         dmaze@debian.org      http://people.debian.org/~dmaze/
"Theoretical politics is interesting.  Politicking should be illegal."
	-- Abra Mitchell