Python ntpq

[Eric S. Raymond]

Hal Murray <hmurray at megapathdsl.net>:
> 
> > OTOH, I think "sensible upper limit" is reasonable to try.  What would you
> > propose?  Is there any way to gather statistics on the length distribution
> > of hostmes, so we can set a threshold that handles 95% of cases? 
> 
> We could write a script that does DNS lookups on the pool servers, reverses 
> those addresses, and then does whatever statistics you want.  You will get 
> different statistics if you do/don't eliminate duplicates.

Yes.  But no big deal to collect both.

> A quick poking around finds things like
>   c-24-15-80-185.hsd1.il.comcast.net
>   4e.f4.36a9.ip4.static.sl-reverse.com
> 
> I don't have any IPv6 examples handy.
> 
> How about you set things up for 25 or 30 and we can see how that feels while 
> I collect data?

That works for me, but...

> Another approach would be to make it big enough for the worst case IPv6 
> numerical printout.

...I like that better, because we can document it as a principled limit
rather than an arbitrary magic number.

Looks to me like the number 39 would work.  That's 8 4-byte hex octets
plus seven colon separators.

Your examples, which are on the long side but not atypical for ISP
hostnames, are 34 and 36 characters.  I don't think I often see
anything longer than that. Which gives me a good feeling about this number;
I bet we'll find it is 2 STDs above mean.
-- 
		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>