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

[Christopher Faylor]

On Wed, Feb 28, 2001 at 02:16:33PM -0800, Jason Molenda wrote:
>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.

I was actually surprised to see that we were using identd.  I noticed
this a while ago.  I'd vote for turning it off.

>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.

I have no objections.

cgf