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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!mhuxr!ihnp4!zehntel!hplabs!hao!seismo!brl-tgr!tgr!POSTEL@USC-ISIF.ARPA
From: POSTEL@USC-ISIF.ARPA
Newsgroups: net.mail.headers
Subject: re: lower case host names
Message-ID: <8301@brl-tgr.ARPA>
Date: Wed, 13-Feb-85 00:10:55 EST
Article-I.D.: brl-tgr.8301
Posted: Wed Feb 13 00:10:55 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 16-Feb-85 06:40:27 EST
Sender: news@brl-tgr.ARPA
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab
Lines: 22


The case of characters in hosts names is not significant.  That is, names
are to be recognized independent of case.  If some host likes to use its
name in a mixed case style (e.g., MIT-devMultics), that is fine, but it
can't complain that some other caseification makes it's name somehow wrong
(e.g., MIT-DEVMULTICS or Mit-Devmultics are still legal names for that host).

[As an aside, for years the Multics hosts insisted that the name of my
host was "USC-ISIf" (note the lower case f).  No one at ISI ever suggested or
liked that name.  And for a long time we couldn't get the Multics people to
change it.  As far as i can tell it was the Multics people who started silly
caseification of host names.] 

One thing that does happen to host names is that they are required to be the
official names, not nick names or locally used aliases.  Sometimes a program
fixes this by using the host tables to convert the given name into a number
(internet address) then convert the number into the official name.  Thus you
end up with the caseification that was in the host table on the host where
the fix was performed.

--jon.
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