critical impact:

MAXHOSTNAMELEN constant - different value (CrCh106)

Problem description

The MAXHOSTNAMELEN constant is the maximum length of Internet host name strings, and is defined differently on Tru64 UNIX and HP-UX.

The MAXHOSTNAMELEN constant is the size of the largest host name the system can handle. On Tru64 UNIX, it is 256 characters; on HPUX, 64 characters. This might affect programs using the following APIs and commands: hostname(1), gethostname(2), and sethostname(2). If the code is not using the MAXHOSTNAMELEN constant, you must still ensure that any buffers containing a host name in the code are defined to be less than MAXHOSTNAMELEN.

Starting with HPUX 11iv3, long node and host names sizes are supported. This feature enables user to set hostname of length 256 characters.

Identifiers

gethostname	MAXHOSTNAMELEN
hostname	sethostname

See also

• Background information on networking impacts
• hostname(1)
• gethostname(2)
• sethostname(2)

Solution description

Change long host names to be less than MAXHOSTNAMELEN.

A future version of HP-UX will include a larger MAXHOSTNAMELEN. If your code or script is using sethostname(2) or hostname(1) to set the hostname of the system, you must ensure that the name is less than 64 characters.

HPUX 11iv3 supports long node and host names. Applications which want to take advantage of long node and host names should perform the following on HPUX 11iv3:

• Compile your application with -D_HPUX_API_LEVEL=20040821 option.
• Ensure that you have provided large buffer size of 256 characters.

See also

• hostname(1)
• gethostname(2)
• sethostname(2)

Problem summary