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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!cbosgd!ulysses!allegra!mit-eddie!genrad!panda!talcott!harvard!bu-cs!root
From: root@bu-cs.UUCP (Barry Shein)
Newsgroups: net.news
Subject: Re: I am for splitting up the UUCP domain.
Message-ID: <252@bu-cs.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 16-Mar-85 19:40:35 EST
Article-I.D.: bu-cs.252
Posted: Sat Mar 16 19:40:35 1985
Date-Received: Mon, 18-Mar-85 01:36:10 EST
References: <1184@ukma.UUCP>, <467@down.FUN>
Organization: Boston Univ Comp. Sci.
Lines: 44

[Re: comment about having more than one host name being stupid,
reference to bu-cs == bostonu]

It is sorta dumb when taken completely out of historical and
other contexts...would that the world were such.

1. It is incredibly unfortunate that the research machine at
Boston U was ever known by BOSTONU.CSNET. Unfortunate because
there exists an older BOSTONU.BITNET which is a different
machine (an IBM3081, main Academic computing facility).

2. To fix that problem I asked my users (mostly C.S. Faculty) what
they would rather be called, they responded: BU-CS [as in MIT-MC,
SU-AI etc I guess]. Fine, we are now BU-CS.CSNET and only respond
to BOSTONU.CSNET for backwards compatibility...this will go away soon.

3. Not really solved...of course, DECNET won't allow an hyphen
in a name (not that we are a DECNET node, it's 4.2bsd but there
are enough decnet nodes on campus that this seemed like a good point.)
So...we also respond locally to BUCSA and BUCS (the former a common
convention on campus: BUdept[a,b,c...]. The latter sounding more like
BUCS just with the hyphen removed.

4. Still not really solved, got a call from CSNET that *they* would
prefer if we responded to BOSTONU-CS.CSNET cuz they were afraid people
don't associate BU with BOSTON U. (?I dunno, I thought they would but
I live here.) Sounded reasonable so....

I'm getting real sick of fighting this war!

I guess the point is don't say 'stupid' so easily, assume the
people in charge *do* probably know what they are doing and
wonder *why*!

On the other hand, I am not sure what the big deal is? They all
work fine, your mail won't get lost, consider the others nicknames.
If some program won't work well with this it really oughta get fixed
(or just choose one name and stick with it, what's the problem with
that???). We aren't the only ones, there are hundreds of hosts with
nicknames.

	-Barry Shein, Boston University

	bzs@bostonu, bzs@bu-cs, bzs@bucsa, bzs@bucs,lordknows!bzs