InetAddress.getByName failing for valid domains

Question

On some machines, domains starting with the hyphen (and other non-alphabetic characters) are not resolved by InetAddress.getByName()
nslookup does resolve the domains, so they seem to be valid - perhaps not by the RFC, but it seems that other common tools do consider the domain to be valid.
here are some domains that fail:
----thomiiii.hi5.com
*.letsgodigital.es
*.chordie.comI found the org.xbill.DNS package that resolves these domains.
Wondering why the InetAddress class does not. I tried looking at the source, but it led me to a native implemention:
static native InetAddress getHostByNameImpl(String name, boolean preferIPv6Address) throws UnknownHostException;
but i couldn't find the source for this native implementation.
Here is a bit of code that runs the two functions together. After it hits the exception with the InetAddress function, it retries with the Address function (from the org.xbill.DNS package, which works)
import java.net.InetAddress;
import org.xbill.DNS.Address;
public class MemLimitCheck {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        try {
            InetAddress ia = InetAddress.getByName(args[0]);
            byte[] addr = ia.getAddress();
            String host = ia.getHostAddress();
            System.out.println(host);
        } catch (Exception e){
            System.err.println(e.getMessage());
            e.printStackTrace();
            try {
                InetAddress ia = Address.getByName(args[0]);
                byte[] addr = ia.getAddress();
                String host = ia.getHostAddress();
                System.out.println(host);               
            } catch (Exception t) {
                System.err.println(t.getMessage());
                t.printStackTrace();
}Edited by: thushw on Jul 20, 2010 11:40 AM
Edited by: thushw on Jul 20, 2010 11:40 AM
Edited by: thushw on Jul 20, 2010 11:41 AM
Edited by: thushw on Jul 20, 2010 11:42 AM

Answer 1

here are some domains that fail:
----thomiiii.hi5.com
A very deliberately invalid domain name. I suspect that one needs to come to the attention of the police. In any case the intention is clearly to fail hostname checks, so you would probably be doing yourself and everybody else a favour by letting that happen. Unless perchance you are the police.
*.letsgodigital.es
*.chordie.comThese are just synonyms for letsgodigital.com and chordie.com respectively. I can't browse to either of them, although nslookup returns an IP address, same as for without the star/dot in each case.
I do wonder what this is all about.