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From: tcp-ip@ucbvax.ARPA
Newsgroups: fa.tcp-ip
Subject: Re: Doing the Right Thing
Message-ID: <8212@ucbvax.ARPA>
Date: Sat, 15-Jun-85 20:55:27 EDT
Article-I.D.: ucbvax.8212
Posted: Sat Jun 15 20:55:27 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 16-Jun-85 03:21:28 EDT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.ARPA
Organization: University of California at Berkeley
Lines: 34

From: Joe Weening <JJW@SU-AI.ARPA>

    From: HOSTMASTER@SRI-NIC

    ... version (#458) reverted the name field to the following format:

    ... :domain name (if any), official name.arpa, official name, nickname: ...

    From: Mike Muuss <mike@BRL.ARPA>

    At such time as the NIC reorders the tables to have the full (new) domain
    name of the host FIRST, our table-builder will break again, but hopefully we
    will have transitioned to using the domain servers by then, and have rid
    ourselves of our .ARPA tables all together!

Consider yourselves broken.  (Look at the PURDUE.EDU entries in table #458.)
The fix to use the NIC table correctly is absolutely trivial on most systems:
just make sure "." is a legal character in host names, use the first name in
the NIC table as the official name, and allow others as nicknames.  It is
even easier than the kludge method, because no special handling of the
string ".ARPA" is needed.  Most of us did this back in late 1983 when we
were asked to.

On the issue of nicknames in the ARPA domain: if you use the host table,
there are (almost) none, not counting the non-domain nicknames, but if you
query the official servers it appears that all of the non-domain nicknames
have been turned into nickname.ARPA forms.  This is unfortunate; it would
be better to have the table and the name servers agree as long as the ARPA
domain remains.  (Which might be a while, since Milnet hosts still need to
set a date for their conversion.)  Presumably the nickname.ARPA forms have
not been added to the table because that would increase its size too much,
so I think they should be removed from the name server database as well.

						Joe