gethostbyaddr() windows behaviour / fixing bad windows behaviour in general

[Jan Tisje]

Hi,

I just found the answer to a problem I often had with windows:

http://windump.polito.it/misc/faq.htm#Q-10
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Q-10: Why WinDump hangs for some seconds while capturing? How can I 
avoid it?

A: The cause of the slowness is that is that gethostbyaddr(), used by 
Windump to resolve the host names, on Windows actually uses more than 
just DNS and hosts files to translate IP addresses to names: it also 
tries using NetBIOS-over-TCP to do the translation. The translation of 
an IP address to a NetBIOS name requires to send a NetBIOS Name Service 
Node Status Request (see section 4.2.17 of RFC 1002) to the IP address, 
and wait for a reply: the reply will have the machine's NetBIOS name. 
However, if the machine in question isn't running any NetBIOS name 
service code (most non-Windows boxes don't), no reply will come back. An 
ICMP Port Unreachable might get sent out, but that might not cause an 
error to get delivered to the socket on which the request was sent. 
Therefore, the machine trying to get the name might have to wait for the 
request to time out before concluding that it can't get the name for 
that IP address using NetBIOS.  That could take a significant amount of 
time.

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I still hope Reactos will fix all those annoying bugs of Windows.

Please allow me to ask if you really did/will fix this problem.

Your answer will significantly increase or decrease my interest in the 
reactos project.  :-)
Because it throws a light on your opinion about dealing with problems 
like this.

Currently I hope reactos will be a nice and small replacement for all 
fat and intransparent MS stuff. (ie remove everything except basic OS)

btw, did anybody read the Bill Gates interview in the Spiegel? Every 
sentence was a lie. He is my most hated person after Bush

byebye
and continue good work. World is waiting for ya.

Jan

[Ralph Shumaker]

Jan Tisje wrote:
> Hi,
> Currently I hope reactos will be a nice and small replacement for all 
> fat and intransparent MS stuff. (ie remove everything except basic OS)

Gates once said that NT is a better Unix than Unix.  (A lie.)  Now, it's 
turning out that ReactOS will be all that Windows *should* have been.  
(The truth.)
> btw, did anybody read the Bill Gates interview in the Spiegel? Every 
> sentence was a lie. He is my most hated person after Bush

If he cannot convince himself of the lies, he does not have much hope of 
fooling others.  In other words, he has already deluded himself.

[Thomas Weidenmueller]

Ralph Shumaker wrote:
> Now, it's turning out that ReactOS will be all that Windows *should* 
> have been.  (The truth.)

If we actually attempted to archive that goal we couldn't ever preserve 
compatibility to win32 applications and propably also not to drivers...

Regards,
Thomas

[Jakob Eriksson]

> > btw, did anybody read the Bill Gates interview in the Spiegel? Every 
> > sentence was a lie. He is my most hated person after Bush

Whatever happened to hate the sin, not the sinner?  ;-)

regards,
Jakob