Christoph Anton Mitterer wrote: > Bob Proulx wrote: > > Software there asks, who am I? They then pass the > > IP address around. > > Software doing this is simply broken. > > Nothing guarantees (nor any standard demands) that the hostname actually > resolves to anything, not to talk about a valid public IP address.
First let me say that I agree completely. I explicitly said that in my message. It is completely wrong. That doesn't change the fact that it is often coded that way. Second though is that there is a lot of things that are wrong with the world. It is often outside of your power to affect them. In which case you can only suck it up and work around the mess and deal with it. That one-sytem == one-IP model was commonly used in Unix software for years and years. It is still used. The two primary problem children that I see today are Synopsis and Cadence. However even they don't have the in house technical knowledge to fix their problems anymore. I gave up trying to tilt at those windmills long ago. The real lesson here is that people shouldn't be creating *new* software that relies upon that buggy model. How do we influence people so that we don't have this problem moving forward? The only way I know is to avoid having that configuration as the normal configuration. That is yet another point in favor of using a hostname mapped to 127.0.1.1 in /etc/hosts. As the new generation "grows up" with that configuration then they won't make the old bad assumptions and won't code in that buggy operating model that causes people problems such as I described. BTW... If you want to look at something you might actually be able to fix then look at Spring RTS. It has been a while and I will munge the detail but last I played it that game made exactly the same assumption of passing IP addresses around and passing a 127 to the remote for connection. The remote client trying to join the game gets a 127 address and can't join itself. The two systems have to work in cooperation with one the server and the other the client so that remote IP addresses are passed between them. In the right combination of two machines it works but trying to do both on one system fails. Since that is free(dom) licensed it is possible that someone might actually fix it one day. Bob
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