Johnny's new resolver, was Re: [HECnet] Arabic / Unicode support on VMS?

[Dave McGuire]

On 12/18/2013 05:43 PM, Johnny Billquist wrote:
To get more on topic - I'm working on a name resolver for RSX right now.
It's a totally awesome thing, and I only wish Unix (or even VMS) had
something similar. So it resolves names. Nothing spectacular about that.
But instead of having a resolv.conf, like Unix, I instead use a
RESOLV$ORDER logical name to tell what kind of resolving I want. This
has a comma separated list, and understands LOGICAL, FILE and DNS.

FILE uses the file "HOSTS" to lookup IP address and name mappings.
LOGICAL uses logical names for the mapping.
DNS uses the domain name system. (With logical names giving the address
of the DNS server, as well as what domain name to use.)

So far, so good. Now, the neater part is that any user can (of course)
override any part of this by having their own logical names for the
resolve order, the HOSTS filename, add their own name resolutions
through logical names, as well as having a different DNS server, or
default domain name.

And it uses almost no memory in the user process. Instead the interface
goes through the I/O system to the TCP driver, which in turn invokes a
separate ACP for the name resolving, and that ACP adopts the UIC and
logical name tables of the process who did the call.

Furthermore, the resolver ACP is multithreaded, and it do caching, even
between different users (when applicable) and different programs.

Sorry, I just had to brag a little on how cool that is. :-)

(Now I just need to finish the DNS part of it.)

  Ok, now that really does sound cool!

  I need to get back into RSX.   I haven't run it in a very long time.

                          -Dave

-- 
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA