Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcsun!ukc!stl!robobar!ronald From: ronald@robobar.co.uk (Ronald S H Khoo) Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip.domains Subject: Re: CS top-level domain and its impact on the UK? Message-ID: <1990Jul29.103214.14864@robobar.co.uk> Date: 29 Jul 90 10:32:14 GMT References: <1990Jul23.065901.8741@ifi.uio.no> <1990Jul28.235750.20841@kth.se> Organization: Robobar Ltd., Perivale, Middx., ENGLAND. Lines: 77 perand@admin.kth.se (Per Andersson) writes: > Let them be known as foo@bar.baz.janet or something. I hope I'm right in reading sarcasm into this statement. I thought we got away from network based addresses LONG time ago. Besides, you're mixing up two separate issues there: The political issue: the .UK registry (known as the NRS) registers names the wrong way round in their forms. I'm under .UK so I'm OFFICIALLY registered as UK.CO.ROBOBAR (yes, in capitals :-) but I'm not on JANET [though to be mailable from JANET, I must register an APPLICATION-RELAY who _is_ on JANET to send me my mail -- its like an MX -- that seems reasonable to me]. The technical issue: the coloured book transport mechanisms officially used on JANET uses reversed names. That's TRANSPORT. UUCP transport is far worse, and yet it is possible to Get Things Nearly Right with UUCP. It's also politically necessary for some Universities to have to provide a user interface that accepts these backwards addresses, this is ALSO not a real problem (see below). The current situation is in fact only minimally sub-optimal. NRS addresses ARE valid Internet addresses -- The Internet domains under .UK belong to the NRS, that is all. And yes, Piercarlo, they _are_ Internet domains. OK, so 99.9 % of the domains under .UK are just MX'd behind either the nsf.ac.uk or mcsun.eu.net (like me) but that's neither here nor there. Lots of North American domains are similarly MX'd behind uunet.uu.net, et. al. What's the difference ? > and is't certainly > not Csechoslovakias fault that the UK domain scheme is backwards. It can't > be that hard for the gateways to turn the adresses around. Simple. The NRS scheme requires that ALL addressable hosts are registered in the database. The correct solution is to try the reversed addressed address for an EXACT match in the NRS database, and if it isn't there, then it isn't a valid NRS address, SO USE IT THE RIGHT WAY ROUND. Some JANET-type oughta write up an RFC for this sorta thing :-) The heuristics are similar to those you need for matching incomplete local addresses. After all, a hypothetical jerry@complex.math.foo.edu who wanted to mail freddy@gizmo.cs.foo.edu might quite reasonably say that "mail freddy@gizmo.cs" should work as he expects, and only if gizmo.cs.foo.edu doesn't exist does he expect the mailer to look in Czechoslovakia. Whether it does or not should be a LOCAL policy issue and not impinge on the Internet at large. I would personally prefer not to have lost the ability to mail the REAL gizmo.CS and REQUIRE FQDNs even internally ("so set up a mail alias" would be what I'd say) but that's a *LOCAL* policy issue. Which way round you start off with depends on your political needs. Some UK Universities are quite powerful enough not to need to bother, so some of their user interfaces provide support for correctly ordered addresses. More cautious places may need to leave their general mail services the wrong way round, but that's a *LOCAL* problem. All you need to do is treat JANET as a local net with a strange internal interface. That's all. Internally, JANET sites have a simple technical solution, which only requires that they specify which way round any particular user interface is configured. If they ALL just specified them the right way round, there's nothing their political masters could do about it. "I'm sorry sir, the sendmail.cf's come from the USA configured like this and we don't have a mail guru who can fix it. We have been asking for this extra sysadmin post for a while but budget restrictions have frozen recruitment this year." The kludge of trying to accept addresses either way round globally is just a bad kludge. But it did mean that no decisions needed to be made, I guess. Now the kludge is starting to get strained, perhaps someone will have to do something. I must admit I'm glad it's not me. -- Eunet: Ronald.Khoo@robobar.Co.Uk Phone: +44 81 991 1142 Fax: +44 81 998 8343 Paper: Robobar Ltd. 22 Wadsworth Road, Perivale, Middx., UB6 7JD ENGLAND.