From: Hugh Sasse Staff Elec Eng <hgs@...>
Date: 2003-02-12T00:50:23+09:00
Subject: Portable FQDM in Ruby?

I am trying to get the fully qualified domain name of a machine in a
way that is posrtable in Ruby.

My very first shot was something like

puts %x{hostname} + '.' + %x{domainname}

but that only works on Unix, and I need it portable across PCs too.

My next shot was:

Socket.gethostname

but this returned a nostname that was not fully qualified, which is
fair enough

Socket.gethostbyname(IPSocket.getaddress(host))

didn't return a fully qualified name either.

Is there a generalised way to do this, or is the assumption that
this is possible for all hosts on the internet somehow false?  I
know for hosts not on the internet (192.168.0.0/16 [?]) this could
and probably should fail, but...

I'm trying to take advantage of the portability of ruby here, to
avoid lots of 'case RUBY_PLATFORM ...' code.

        Thank you,
        Hugh