From: Reimer Behrends <behrends@...>
Date: 2003-09-30T05:30:19+09:00
Subject: Re: TCPSocket.gethostbyname difficulties

Yukihiro Matsumoto (matz@ruby-lang.org) wrote:
[...]
>  This works for me:
>  
>    ruby -r socket -e 'p TCPSocket.gethostbyname("noblepack.com")'
>    ruby 1.8.0 (2003-09-27) [i686-linux]
>    ["noblepack.com", [], 2, "205.178.141.161"]
>  
>  Could you tell us more info?

This surprises me, since there is no PTR record for 205.178.141.161,
and ruby (1.8.0 in my case) insists on doing a gethostbyaddr() on
that address (in sock_hostbyname()) and will raise a "host not
found" error if gethostbyaddr() fails (usually if there is no PTR
record). That lookup is performed regardless of the value of
Socket.do_not_reverse_lookup.

Incidentally, what is the rationale behind requiring the presence of
a PTR record? There are many hosts that do not have one, especially
virtual web hosts, and I have found Socket/TCPSocket.gethostbyname to be
fairly useless as a result (and instead resorted to using
Resolv.getaddress[es]).

			Reimer Behrends