Re: ~/.hosts patch

On Wed, Jun 21, 2006 at 08:09:53PM -0400, Garance A Drosihn wrote:
> At 10:30 PM -0700 6/20/06, Brooks Davis wrote:
> >
> >It's useful for cases where you want to add shortcuts
> >to hosts as a user or do interesting ssh port forwarding
> >tricks in some weird cases where you must connect to
> >localhost:port as remotehost:port due to client/server
> >protocol bugs.
> 
> As far as interesting tricks for ssh, you should already
> be able to do that with ~/.ssh/config.  Note ~/.hosts
> would only redirect the hostnames, and not ports.  I use
> ~/.ssh/config so that a plain '_at_host' request actually
> goes to '_at_host:alternate-port', so-to-speak.

I'm very familiar with .ssh/config and it's not sufficent for at least
one server I know of.  The problem is that the client must think it is
connecting to server.fully.qualified.domain and do so by name because
the name is passed to the server which misuses in in interesting ways.
In particular, local servers can forward requests to remote servers and
when "localhost" is passed the server makes new connections to
"localhost" until the system runs out of file descriptors or socket
buffers.  The only way around this is to make
server.fully.qualified.domain point to 127.0.0.1.  What would actually
be perfect in this case would be to modifiy getaddrinfo() to let you do
host:port mappings as the DNS system designers obviously intended but
never did beyond MX records, that's a whole different scope though.

-- Brooks

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