Weird Problem

Danny Mayer mayer at gis.net
Wed Jun 27 18:26:40 UTC 2001


"Smith, William E. (Bill), Jr." wrote:

> One of our desktop support personnel contacted me to state that some of
> their users were having problems with a  particular application working
> correctly.  When I inquired for details, I was told that the application
> relied on host names being resolved in lowercase format.  i.e
> BILL.jhuapl.edu as opposed to bill.jhuapl.edu.  My first impression was to
> say that an application that relies on this is a not a well written one
> since DNS doesn't care(at least when using nslookup) whether the host is in
> uppercase, lowercase or a mixture of both.  To see what the user was
> referring to, I asked for an example.  I'm providing the output of a lookup
> by hostname and IP.  When doing via IP it returns the hostname in caps for
> whatever reason.  The client in question here is NT4.  This problem seems be
> consistent across NT 4 clients. When I lookup on some W2K clients, I don't
> see this behavior.  When I look at the zone file the host is in lowercase.
> I'm kinda baffled by this one but I'm still of the opinion that an
> application shouldn't be dependent on the case of a hostname.  Running third
> party dns(bind 8.2.2P7 equivalent) on primary and 8.2.3 on secondaries.  Has
> anyone see this behavior before? Any insight would be appreciated
>
> Thanks,
>
> Bill
>
> Name:    brudide1.jhuapl.edu
> Address:  128.244.54.149
>
> > 128.244.54.149
> Server:  apldns1.jhuapl.edu
> Address:  128.244.197.32
>
> Name:    BRUDIDE1.jhuapl.edu
> Address:  128.244.54.149

    I see this happen a lot with WINS servers which use upper case (and no
domain info).  Are you running WINS Servers for these NT boxes?

        Danny




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