===README===

This document describes the limitation and restriction as imposed by the
current FreeBSD's system library for resolving domain names and suggests
two
workarounds to overcome it.

FreeBSD's system library, libc.so.3 (FreeBSD 3.3), contains a resolver

component that is responsible for resovling domain names. The interface
to this component is via gethostbyname(3). gethostbyname(3) will return a
valid hostent structure when the domain name resolves successfully. It
will

otherwise return a NULL pointer if no such name exists.

There is currently one restriction imposed by the resolver to return a
NULL
hostent structure for names that are non-compliant to RFC1035, even though
there are valid records associated with the name concerned. This can be
demonstrated by turning on debugging and call gethostbyname(3) and giving
it
any valid internationalized domain name. You will notice that the
debugging
messages printed out by the various sub-components of the resolver library
indicates clearly that the DNS server does indeed return a valid A Record.
The
final result, however is not passed back by gethostbyname(3) because the
name

queried did not comply with RFC1035.

There are currently two methods to overcome this minor problem, as
proposed by I-DNS.NET International. The first is to engage Internet
Software
Consortium's (ISC) software package, Berkeley Internet Name Daemon (BIND)
8.2.2 patch level 5. This particular package provides a separate resolver
library (libbind.a) which the end user can use in place of FreeBSD's
libc.so.3
(or libc.a). There is an option to bypass the RFC1035 name restriction.
The
trick is to add the following line to your '/etc/resolv.conf' file :-

'options        no-check-names'

This solution, however, is not very transparent to the system
administrators.
The reason is that most applications under FreeBSD 3.x uses dynamic
libraries.
Essentially, the system administrators will need to recompile all system
binaries and link them statically against libbind.a.

The other solution proposed is to patch the system library, libc.so.3
itself.
I-DNS.NET International currently supplies such a patch. What this method
does
is that it essentially replaces the entire C system library with a version
that has a similar option to the one offered by libbind.a. You may choose
to
download the entire libc.so.3 and replace your current one with this.
Alternatively, you may want to download the source of the patch (in diff
format) and patch your source tree.

After installing the patched library, add the following line to your
'/etc/resolv.conf' file to bypass the additional checks.

'options        i18n'

This option mimics the capabilities of ISC's Bind 8.2.2pl5's option
'no-check-names'. The option name of 'i18n' is used so as not to
confuse system administrators.


Note that by omitting this line, your system resolver component behaves
exactly just like your normal C system library.

===README===