Friday, March 20, 1998 at 1:10:13 PM Pacific

Doug's TCP Query

I was talking this morning with Doug Baron, doug@scripting.com, about a problem he's encountering debugging the new native TCP functionality in Frontier/Mac.

The problem actually happens in both the Mac and Windows versions, leading us to believe that it's a problem in Frontier itself.

So I asked Doug to write up a concise description of the problem.

Doug's description

The tcp.addressToName problem is simple, but mysterious:

tcp.nameToAdress ("scripting.com") address is -825485303
tcp.nameToAdress ("www.scripting.com") address is -825485308

tcp.addressToName (-825485303) is "scripting.com"
tcp.addressToName (-825485308) generates an error.

Very little processing is going on here. On the Mac, it's a call to the MacTCP function AddrToName. It's returning the error -23045, authNameErr.

Under Windows, the call is gethostbyaddr. It's returning the error code 11004, WSANO_DATA. The description is "Valid name, no data record of the requested type".

I don't know what these errors mean, or how they can be avoided.

This may be a legitimate error being returned by scripting.com's DNS server, but I have no idea why it occurs.

If you can shed some light...

Send email to doug@scripting.com, cc'd to dave@scripting.com.

Thanks!

Postscript

We've seen the light!

Here's the scoop...

It's not a problem with either Frontier, the operating system, or anything else -- it's a problem with the reverse DNS mapping for scripting.com.

Try resolving scripting.com with ANY hostname-type utility -- it comes back as 206.204.24.9. Doing the reverse -- asking it to resolve 206.204.24.9 -- comes back as scripting.com.

Now try resolving www.scripting.com with ANY hostname-type utility -- it comes back as 206.204.24.4. Doing the reverse -- asking it to resolve 206.204.24.4 -- comes back as not found.

This can only mean that the reverse map for scripting.com (I don't know who holds authority for it, you or your ISP) doesn't have the PTR record for 206.204.24.4.

This message came from Jason Levine and several other people. We're in contact with our ISP to get the DNS for www.scripting.com fixed.

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This page was last built on 3/20/98; 1:53:21 PM by Dave Winer. dave@scripting.com