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Re: IDN hostname resolution in NetBSD



Chris Ross wrote:

On May 26, 2010, at 22:58, Chris Ross wrote:
And, while I'm asking the question, is there any known issues/resolutions with setting a NetBSD machines local hostname to an UTF-8, or Latin-1 even, name?

Following up on this late part of the question, it looks like UTF-8 is bad for local hostnames. Many things get confused, not the least of which is wsconsole. But sshd seems to generate keys without understanding it as UTF-8, and postfix harfs, etc etc.

Setting it to a latin1 hostname, including an ö, seems to almost work, or at least show the right thing on boot, but postfix still harfs. Looks like postfix can't handle anything other than 7-bit ascii in it's retrieved hostname.

And, when using latin1, zsh (4.3.10, with a UTF-8 $LANG) screws up pretty badly too, as one might expect.

  So, I think this may be "a bad idea".  :-(

I'm confused. If you use a Latin1 character, how do you expect something which is trying to Grok UTF-8 to be able to parse that? They are not compatible or interchangeable. Actually, Latin1 is a character set, while UTF-8 is a character encoding form for the Unicode character set.

As for uppercase letters, that is not a problem. Host names are case insensitive.

Personally, I stay far away from UTF-8 whenever I can. It's not a good solution, the only problem being that it's now the standard, so no other better solution is going to come along. :-( (Actually, Unicode is part of the problem, but that is here to stay as well.)

Latin1 works better for almost anything, as long as you don't need characters not represented there, at which point it becomes useless (obviously).

        Johnny

--
Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                  ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt%softjar.se@localhost             ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol


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