gethostby* users

[Simo Sorce]

On Sat, 2007-10-13 at 09:14 -0700, Ulrich Drepper wrote:
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> Simo Sorce wrote:
> > Ulrich, some people claim that glibc's getaddrinfo breaks IPv4 DNS round
> > robin as it reorders also IPv4 address, can you comment on this? In some
> > cases it is important.
> 
> It is not necessary (and quite wrong) to implement RR in the server.
> It's an approximation at best anyway.  In no way better than
> randomization.  And nothing stops programs from randomizing the results
> returned by getaddrinfo before using them.  Normal programs won't do
> that but there is nothing which stops programs like ntpd from doing this.

Well, whether this is good or not, it is a mechanism widely used in many
cases, because it is good enough. Not sure breaking it on purpose make
sense, after all IPv4 sorting is just arbitrary, why caring to do it at
all?
What is the purpose of IPv4 address reordering ?

Simo.