This family of functions allows you to perform lookups of Hesiod
information, which is stored as text records in the Domain Name
Service. To perform lookups, you must first initialize a
context,
an opaque object which stores information used internally by the
library between calls.
hesiod_init
initializes a context, storing a pointer to the context in the
location pointed to by the
context
argument.
hesiod_end
frees the resources used by a context.
hesiod_resolve
is the primary interface to the library. If successful, it returns a
list of one or more strings giving the records matching
name
and
type.
The last element of the list is followed by a NULL pointer. It is the
caller's responsibility to call
hesiod_free_list
to free the resources used by the returned list.
hesiod_to_bind
converts
name
and
type
into the DNS name used by
hesiod_resolve.
It is the caller's responsibility to free the returned string using
hesiod_free_string.
hesiod_parse_result
parses the result of a name server query into text records. It is the
caller's responsibility to call
hesiod_free_list
to free the resources used by the returned list.
RETURN VALUES
If successful,
hesiod_init
returns 0; otherwise it returns -1 and sets
errno
to indicate the error. On failure,
hesiod_resolve
and
hesiod_to_bind
return NULL and set the global variable
errno
to indicate the error.
ENVIRONMENT
If the environment variable
HES_DOMAIN
is set, it will override the domain in the Hesiod configuration file.
If the environment variable
HESIOD_CONFIG
is set, it specifies the location of the Hesiod configuration file.
SEE ALSO
`Hesiod - Project Athena Technical Plan -- Name Service', named(8),
hesiod.conf(5)
ERRORS
Hesiod calls may fail because of:
ENOMEM
Insufficient memory was available to carry out the requested
operation.
ENOEXEC
hesiod_init
failed because the Hesiod configuration file was invalid.
ECONNREFUSED
hesiod_resolve
failed because no name server could be contacted to answer the query.
EMSGSIZE
hesiod_resolve
or
hesiod_to_bind
failed because the query or response was too big to fit into the
packet buffers.
ENOENT
hesiod_resolve
failed because the name server had no text records matching
name
and
type,
or
hesiod_to_bind
failed because the
name
argument had a domain extension which could not be resolved with type
``rhs-extension'' in the local Hesiod domain.
AUTHOR
Steve Dyer, IBM/Project Athena
Greg Hudson, MIT Team Athena
Copyright 1987, 1988, 1995, 1996, 2000 by the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology.
BUGS
The strings corresponding to the
errno
values set by the Hesiod functions are not particularly indicative of
what went wrong, especially for
ENOEXEC
and
ENOENT.