From: Paul Brannan <pbrannan@...>
Date: 2002-08-30T01:18:49+09:00
Subject: gethostbyname() requires reverse lookup to work?

We ran into a problem last night where we could ping a host, telnet to
it, ssh to it, look it up with dig, and traceroute to it, but the
following ruby code failed:

  ruby -rsocket -e 'p Socket.gethostbyname("host")'

The problem turned out to be that Ruby was looking up the host, and then
doing a reverse lookup (and it also turned out that reverse lookup for
this host was broken).  We fixed the name server, and all was well.

But I'm curious: what is the reason for writing socket.c this way?  It
seems almost silly to me to use getaddrinfo() to look up a host and then
to use gethostbyaddr() to get the corresponding hostent structure (which
to the best that I can tell, is what Ruby is doing; please correct me if
I am mistaken).  Why doesn't Ruby call gethostbyname() or
getipnodebyname() directly?

Paul