Should we eliminate IP address lookup for incoming e-mail?

[Jason Molenda]

I have nothing against stopping ident lookups on incoming mail.  I
think the incoming mail volume is too low for it to really matter,
but it won't hurt and the information gathered has little value.


As for the http reverse lookups, I always enabled that by default
because it is easier to understand hostnames than IP#s when looking
at http logs.  Excepting one use in a script[1], I never used the
hostnames for anything.  I agree that these lookups could be disabled
without any loss of capability.  Of course, you can always do the
IP#->hostname lookup at log-processing time if there were a real need.

[1] I always stripped out cygnus/redhat sites from the log files
    before doing any processing on them.  That grep cmd would need
    to be changed to strip out RH's subnets.  At the very least,
    sourceware's IP# should be stripped out - the htdig search
    engine process gropes over all of the web pages on the site,
    and its activities could skew any http reports.

If no one disagrees, I can change the httpd config to stop hostname
lookups.  Today is Red Hat's end of quarter, so we should probably
hold off a few days to give people a chance to speak up.

Jason