The use of hostnames begining with numerics causing problems 1

[RookThis]

We have ecountered a problem with a certain application that fails with machines whose hostname begins with a numberic character. I was wondering if anyone knows if there is an RFC that warns about using numerics as the first character in a hostname convention. Changing the hostname fixes the problem that we are encountering, but since the naming standard for certain devices on a particular subnet was adopted by another organization to begin with numeric characters, we are trying to find an RFC that we can used to convince them that this is not a good practice. This particular problem is probably how the application was coded. I am suspecting that the application is viewing the hostname as either an IP address and return an invalid error, since in the step that it fails is where it attempt to setup the DISPLAY environment variable. I know this is a DNS Bind forum, but I didn't know where this question actually fitted in. Thanks in advance for any help.

 

[GlenJohnson]

Some more details would help. What is the nature of the failures, Page not displayed?

Glen A. Johnson
Johnson Computer Consulting
MCP W2K
glen@johnsoncomputers.us


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[jyorgey]

You are looking for RFC 952.

http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc952.html

The RFC states that the first character has to be an alpha character.