The following reply was made to PR misc/35254; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: Matthias Drochner <M.Drochner@fz-juelich.de>
To: gnats-bugs@NetBSD.org
Cc: taca@back-street.net, misc-bug-people@NetBSD.org,
	gnats-admin@NetBSD.org, netbsd-bugs@NetBSD.org, arto@selonen.org
Subject: Re: misc/35254: telnet (and others?) provide false/misleading/useless 
 error message for name resolution failure
Date: Tue, 19 Dec 2006 17:53:15 +0100

 taca@back-street.net said:
 >  AFAIR, hostname; A or AAAA record dosen't allow '_' in leaf label. 
 
 Generally yes -- RFC1123 allows only alphanumeric and hyphen chars.
 Tolerating the "_" would be in the spirit of "be liberal in what
 you accept".
 In the world out there, there are DNS entries like www.aka.fi's,
 and there are operating systems like Linux and Solaris which
 don't complain about it. (Google told me that also Windows
 allows it, but I did check only the former two myself.)
 
 Newer versions of the resolver lib which comes with BIND support
 an option "no-check-names" to switch off the strict check
 for characters in hostnames. The parsing code is already there,
 just NetBSD's nss glue code was not updated. This is trivial to
 pull in -- I'll post patches to tech-userlevel.
 Allowing each administrator to decide for himself looks like
 a reasonable compromise to me.
 
 best regards
 Matthias