Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!pacbell!pacbell.com!ucsd!sdd.hp.com!hplabs!hpcc01!cricket
From: cricket@hpcc01.HP.COM (Cricket Liu)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip.domains
Subject: Re: What do you do when one domain swallows another?
Message-ID: <4500001@hpcc01.HP.COM>
Date: 6 Sep 90 18:02:37 GMT
References: <1990Sep5.190959.4526@millipore.com>
Organization: HP Internet Data Operations
Lines: 51


    A few months ago Millipore (registered domain millipore.com) acquired
    BioImage (registered domain bioimage.com).  Bioimage has now been
    connected via leased line to Millipore's tcpip network.  Neither
    company directly connects to the Internet, Millipore's forwarder is
    UUNET and Bioimage's is Sharkey at the University of Michigan.  The
    problem is now that Bioimage (the company) is a part of Millipore (the
    company) we need to merge the two domains.

    Luckily, there is no problem for most of the machines.  The Bioimage
    domain was never more than one machine, which is to say that
    user@bioimage.com was the outerworld address.  The rest of the machines
    are known as user@host.millipore.com.  So the problem is that we want
    the one machine (known as Maize)

"We call it Maize," eh?

    to be addressable as both maize.millipore.com and bioimage.com.  There
    is a large customer base that mails to bioimage.com so that must remain
    for the time being.

    Further complicating the matter, we want to discontinue the connection
    with sharkey, using UUNET exclusively.

    So, what do we do?

Well, for the time being, the main thing you want to do is to change
bioimage.com's MX record to point to uunet.uu.net.  (Once you let UUNET
know that it'll be handling Bioimage's mail.)  You have to go the MX route:
you can't make bioimage.com a CNAME (alias) record, because it already has
NS records attached.  (I've never asked the NIC if they'd set up a
second-level domain as a CNAME.  Anyone know if they would?)

Next, make sure that whatever's on the other end of the uunet.uu.net UUCP
connection (presumably something called "millipore.com", or that can handle
mail addressed to "<user>@millipore.com") knows about bioimage.com.  The
easiest way to do that, if you're running nameservers internally and aren't
connected to the Internet, is to set up "bioimage.com" as an alias for
"maize.millipore.com".

That should do it for the short term.  Over time, you'll probably want to
wean correspondents off of "bioimage.com".  The CNAME record pointing to
"maize.millipore.com" should take care of most of that - a large proportion
of correspondents simply reply to messages.  The rest is really a PR issue.

You're lucky that Bioimage had such a small domain.  I once had to do this
with a much larger one.

cricket

hostmaster@hp.com