Subject: Re: Adding TTL information to gethostbyname() and friends
To: The Technology of Networking in NetBSD <tech-net@netbsd.org>
From: Erik E. Fair <fair@clock.org>
List: tech-net
Date: 06/03/2003 12:02:39
There is another application class which should care about TTL, 
exemplified by NTP - applications which form long-lived, non-TCP 
"sessions" (or, to use NTP's terminology, "associations"). Right now, 
associations are done with IP addresses, and if an association ceases 
(i.e. the peer stops responding), ntpd will simply keep on trying.

What ntpd should do is keep the names and the TTL value, and requery 
the DNS for the A record when the TTL expires and/or when the peer 
stops responding. However, we need a decent API to ask the DNS for 
this data.

	Erik <fair@clock.org>