The ECN No Name Newsletter is no longer being published. This is an archived issue.
[previous article] [next article]The hosts text file was originally a listing of the names of all the machines to which Purdue was connected. This included hosts at other schools which were connected to the Internet. The file was generally used for administrative purposes, but anyone who has used this file should be aware that it will be changed very soon.
On September 8th, the ECN wide host text file, /etc/hosts, and network file, /etc/networks, will be trimmed to include only local campus hosts. Information for off campus hosts will no longer be included in this file.
This will not in any way affect access to the off campus hosts. For many years now, all off campus host names and addresses have been resolved using a program called the name server. The system software no longer references the host file for any purpose during normal operations. The full text file has been left as a courtesy to those users who wished to take advantage of it.
With the growth of the Internet, it has become prohibitively expensive to keep the entire text host file on each system. In addition, the host file no longer accurately represents the Internet. The current file lists approximately 8,000 off campus hosts. At last count, the Internet contained approximately 900,000 hosts. The percentage of actual hosts represented in the text host file has become so small as to make the chance of a desired host being listed increasingly remote.
Users who need to track down accurate information on hosts at remote locations are encouraged to read the manual pages for the nslookup and whois commands and to consult their site specialists.
In order to aid those users who still find it advantageous to perform text searches on the old style hosts file, a copy of the network wide data will be available in /usr/ecn/pub/hosts and /usr/ecn/pub/networks on all ECN Sun systems.
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