hesiod aliases for illegal DNS names

[Andreas Gustafsson]

Don Lewis <Don.Lewis at tsc.tdk.com> said:
> We've been using a somewhat modified version hesiod to distribute our
> sendmail alias database and would now like to migrate to a publicly
> distributed version of the hesiod code.  A problem that we initially
> ran into was that we had some names, such as "foo..bar" that could not
> be legally represented in DNS.  The standard hesiod library translates
> this into "foo..bar.ns.example.com" for the DNS lookup.  The problem
> is that the zero length label indicates the end of the domain name.
> The way we solved this problem was to hack our copy of the hesiod
> library to escape all the periods in the name being looked up, so
> that the DNS name would be "foo\.\.bar.ns.example.com".