Re: Mail systems on AOL

Article: 8424 of alt.hackers
From: szinger@circuit.mtc.eng.yale.edu (James Szinger)
Newsgroups: alt.hackers
Subject: Re: Mail systems on AOL
Date: 10 Aug 1995 17:19:52 GMT
Organization: Yale EE Morse Teaching Center
Lines: 36
Approved: Ashtar
Message-ID: SZINGER.95Aug10131952@circuit.mtc.eng.yale.edu
NNTP-Posting-Host: circuit.mtc.eng.yale.edu
In-reply-to: spc@news.gate.net's message of 7 Aug 1995 22:24:23 -0400
Status: RO

In article <406hsn$2a4i@hopi.gate.net> spc@news.gate.net (Sean
'Captain Napalm' Conner) writes:

>[spc]hopi:/u3/spc>nslookup
>Default Server:  odin.gate.net
>Address:  199.227.0.2

>> set type=mx
>> aol.com
[stuff cut for brevity...]

>  I leave how this exactly works as an exercise to the reader.  Also, note
>that AOL does NOT like this information getting out, as it it's proprietary
>or something.  You have been warned.

It's hard to see how this stuff can be considered proprietary since
anyone on the 'Net who knows how to use nslookup can find it out just
for the asking.  AOL needs for this information to be publically known
or no-one can send mail to them.

ObHack: I wanted to query the nameserver by address to return all the
hosts in a range of addresses.  I was planning on using 'nslookup' by
the output is difficult to parse, so some perl code was in order to do
the parsing.  Since this was to be my first perl program, I decided to
RTFM.  I noticed that perl has a 'gethostbyaddr' function but the perl
docs said to read the C library man pages.  Both the SUN and IBM
manpages were quite obtuse and I wasn't any better off than before
reading them.  I played around with it some without much progress.
Then I remembered that SATAN is in perl and it does a 'gethostbyaddr',
and so a grep and cut-and-paste of 4 lines later I was in business.
Now if I could only understand what I did.

Jim
--
James Szinger, SECF Support Specialist
James.Szinger@Yale.edu, szinger@minerva.cis.yale.edu

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