Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mstar!mstar.morningstar.com!bob From: bob@MorningStar.Com (Bob Sutterfield) Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp Subject: Re: Who pays the bill? Message-ID: Date: 10 Aug 90 16:59:19 GMT References: <26A738A8.725B@tct.uucp> <1990Aug8.214750.1614@wolves.uucp> <66582@sgi.sgi.com> Sender: usenet@MorningStar.COM (USENET Administrator) Reply-To: bob@MorningStar.Com (Bob Sutterfield) Organization: Morning Star Technologies Lines: 65 In-Reply-To: vjs@rhyolite.wpd.sgi.com's message of 10 Aug 90 02:07:15 GMT In article <66582@sgi.sgi.com> vjs@rhyolite.wpd.sgi.com (Vernon Schryver) writes: In article <1990Aug8.214750.1614@wolves.uucp> ggw@wolves.uucp (Gregory G. Woodbury) writes: Wrong, if it isn't directly connected, and does not have a valid MX record at the appropriate hosts, IT IS NOT A FQDN! (Amen, brother!) Consider "foo.bar.bozo". Is it a FQDN? I bet you'll say no because "bozo" is not in 1066 or where ever the current list of top-levels is kept. The list is kept in the various root servers, and since .bozo isn't a top-level domain, foo.bar.bozo isn't a FQDN. You're right - score one point. Now consider "foo.uunet.net". Is it a domain name? I bet you'll say yes, since you can productively ask the root servers about "uunet.net" (I'll assume you meant to ask about "foo.uu.net" and "uu.net".) No, foo.uu.net isn't a FQDN because there's no *.uu.net. uunet.uu.net stopped providing that transition service late this spring because too many people were abusing it by assuming that they now had a name that they could use permanently rather than registering their own. Sorry - you lose one point. Finally take "...!trash!foo.bar.bozo!user" and "...!trash!foo.uunet.net!user" Are either "foo.bar.bozo" or "foo.uunet.net" FQDNs in that context? It is sadly likely that many people will presume to answer for the owners of trash. What if trash is a novel Bitnet/CSNET/JANET/EBCDIC device that considers "." an ordinary character? Then the "." shouldn't appear in a context where it is taken for a FQDN. RFC1036 (section 2.1.6, paragraph two, last sentence) says that "letters, digits, periods and hyphens are considered part of host names." If traffic moves between addressing schemes, it's the responsibility of the gateway to ensure that the traffic conformant with each set of standards - whichever side the traffic happens to be on at the moment. If some addressing scheme on FooNet considers dots and dashes to be ordinary characters in hostnames, the gateway must arrive at some functional, bidirectional mapping before introducing such traffic into the realm of the Domain Name System. There is no Law of UUCP carved in stone by Chesson that makes "." an illegal hostname or username character in a UUCP route. There is no rule saying strings separated by "." in a UUCP host name must be known by nic.ddn.mil... The Network Information Center is the authority over the domain name system. The only naming authority that exists to arbitrate between UUCP sites is the UUCP Mapping Project, which registers names to (among other things) guarantee uniqueness. They won't accept a hostname containing dots unless it's a FQDN because of the immense confusion that would result. UUCP (tm) is UUCP, different from the Internet (tm). Then there are Bitnet, Fido, X.400, and other things not dreamed of in our philosophies. And when the twain meet, they must learn to speak each others' languages.