Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.3 alpha 4/15/85; site ucbvax.ARPA Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!ucbvax!tcp-ip From: tcp-ip@ucbvax.ARPA Newsgroups: fa.tcp-ip Subject: Re: Partial BRL Mail Outage: Explained Message-ID: <8185@ucbvax.ARPA> Date: Fri, 14-Jun-85 20:39:22 EDT Article-I.D.: ucbvax.8185 Posted: Fri Jun 14 20:39:22 1985 Date-Received: Sat, 15-Jun-85 08:15:52 EDT Sender: daemon@ucbvax.ARPA Organization: University of California at Berkeley Lines: 26 From: Mark Crispin It is interesting that only the TOPS-20 systems were put off by getting mail referring to "nickname.ARPA". That means that most of the non-TOPS-20 sites still have heuristics which recognize ".ARPA" as a special case. When the NIC started distributing a host table with the .ARPA names, I removed these heuristics, so that the TOPS-20 software would correspond with the obvious intent of the NIC table. BRL's experience should rather dramatically show how bad such heuristics can be. Remember, the RFC's are quite clear in stating that: . only official names may appear in machine-generated fields (message headers, SMTP transactions) . only official names may have .ARPA applied My guess is that BRL ignored the official entry in the host table entirely and used the remaining entries as the name list (ala the old NIC host table). It then applied .ARPA to traffic going out and stripped it coming in (the standard heuristic). Folks, this is a kludge! I believe the TOPS-20's were doing the right thing. Comments? -- Mark -- -------