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From: hedrick@topaz.RUTGERS.EDU (Charles Hedrick)
Newsgroups: net.mail.headers
Subject: Re: hosts.txt & the new domain names
Message-ID: <4049@topaz.RUTGERS.EDU>
Date: Wed, 16-Oct-85 13:07:22 EDT
Article-I.D.: topaz.4049
Posted: Wed Oct 16 13:07:22 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 18-Oct-85 20:30:23 EDT
References: <2167@brl-tgr.ARPA>
Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J.
Lines: 22

The policy we are following at Rutgers is to register with NIC any
host that we expect to send a sigificant amount of mail traffic to the
Arpanet.  I agree that it is not going to be practical for NIC to know
about all of our PC's.  Fortunately, most of them will not be
authorized to send Arpanet mail, or we will be able to provide return
addresses for them via some registered hosts.  (For example, mail sent
from a diskless Sun will show as coming from the file server it is
using.)  Even this cannot work forever, but we hope it will tide us
over the period until resolvers are available for all of our major
operating systems.

We cannot always guess which hosts should be in the table.  So I am
prepared to accept requests from postmasters at other sites to register
Rutgers hosts that are not currently registered.

I agree with Mark Crispin that person@rutgers would be a good way
around having to register all of our hosts.  We are hoping to do that,
but I suspect it will be a year before we can come up with a
network-wide user database.  And even then, such a database will
probably only include hosts that are willing to cooperate.  The
problems in supporting organizational mailboxes are at least as much
organizational as technical.