Subject: Re: pine 3.96 on Solaris: domain name problem

From: [email-masked] (Paul Eggert)
Date: 12 Apr 1997 19:07:24 -0700

[email-masked] (Georg Schwarz) writes:

> I worked around this by adding
>	user-domain=turing.physik.tu-berlin.de
> to /usr/local/lib/pine.conf. However, it's clear that this is not the way
> it ought to be.

That's true, but unfortunately you're caught in the crossfire between
the University of Washington and Solaris.  Solaris has weird and
poorly documented ways of setting and using the domain name(s) of a
host, and these methods have several nasty properties.  For example:

* There is no simple and reliable programmatic way of obtaining the
current host's mail domain name(s).  Programs that need this domain
name adopt a variety of weird strategies to do it.  The most reliable
way is to have a configuration file as shown above, so that you don't
have to worry about Solaris brain damage.

* Hosts can be in more than one domain.  The NIS+ domain name is
not necessarily the same as the DNS domain name (and if you know why
this should be so then you know more than most Solaris system
administrators :-).  And a host can be in more than one DNS domain
(see e.g. the `search' directive in resolv.conf -- oops, sorry, that's
not documented either).

* If you send mail to the current host using the normal mail tools
supplied with Solaris, your resulting mailbox won't conform to RFC 822,
because it won't have proper domains in the mail headers.

The U of W folks's attitude towards this sort of thing is ``Solaris is
broken -- fix it and then use pine''.  To some extent I'm sympathetic.
Unfortunately, you'll have to do some nontrivial sendmail configuration
file hacking to make the U of W folks happy.

If I were you, I'd quit while you're ahead.

---

From: [email-masked] (Matus Uhlar)
Date: 22 Apr 1997 12:24:11 +0200

In comp.sys.sun.admin Paul Eggert <[email-masked]> wrote:
-> >	user-domain=turing.physik.tu-berlin.de

-> That's true, but unfortunately you're caught in the crossfire between
-> the University of Washington and Solaris.  Solaris has weird and
-> poorly documented ways of setting and using the domain name(s) of a
-> host, and these methods have several nasty properties.  For example:

NO, that's not problem of solaris many systems have the same problem.
domain names aren't simple. 
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