Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!seismo!uwvax!husc6!panda!genrad!decvax!decwrl!sun!guy From: guy@sun.UUCP Newsgroups: net.mail Subject: Re: Domains: Multiple names OK? (really, decommissioning of nicknames) Message-ID: <6996@sun.uucp> Date: Mon, 8-Sep-86 06:47:57 EDT Article-I.D.: sun.6996 Posted: Mon Sep 8 06:47:57 1986 Date-Received: Mon, 8-Sep-86 21:16:25 EDT References: <566@mecc.UUCP> <2502@cbosgd.UUCP> <3920@ut-ngp.UUCP> <41448@beno.seismo.CSS.GOV> <3936@ut-ngp.UUCP> Organization: Sun Microsystems, Inc. Lines: 53 > the problem is, of course, that such action also impacts *SEVERELY* the user > interface and causes all kind of aggravation and wasted time for users, Only if the users haven't been properly notified of the impending change; I believe the disappearance of non-domained nicknames has been warned about for some time. It ain't Rick's fault if your site administrators didn't warn you. > Removing SEISMO from the NIC-table, BTW, only caused some sites to add an > entry for Seismo in their local tables. > > I'm all for computers talking "domain-addresses" - I am against users having > to deal with that aggravation. From your first comment, it seems that you can hide this from users by adding an entry for "seismo" to your local tables. What's the problem? > ...why in this day and age of Fifth Generation computers, Expert Systems, > and (shudder) Star-Wars, a user has to now learn that SEISMO has become > SEISMO.CSS.GOV, UTEXAS-20 is now R20.UTEXAS.EDU, and UT-NGP has become > NGP.CC.UTEXAS.EDU. Well, aside from the fact that the first and third items in your list are buzz words and research projects, and nobody that I know of has felt motivated to build an instance of the second item to figure out mail addresses yet, this changeover is no worse than, say, the changeover to all-digit dialing, or changes caused by splitting up area codes. Yes, they're painful, but it's a *one-time* cost. The net result, at least in theory, is that with name space administration being decentralized you won't have to work as hard to avoid name collisions. Imagine Sun putting all of its machines on the Internet - not bloody likely, but let's use it as an example. There are ~1600 hosts on our internal net; I suspect the chances that one of their names would duplicate the name of a host already on the Arpanet would be rather high. If the names are of the form ".sun.com", however, we'd just have to avoid duplication within our domain. I'm damned if I'm going to change my machine's name just because somebody at the University of Southern North Dakota also decided to call their machine "gorodish"... And as for "typing those darn stupid domains on every single address", *I* certanly don't find it a problem. My ".mailrc" file certainly helps, since the people I'm likely to send mail to are all in there. If you're really concerned about naive users, consider that those users are likely not to want to think about host names *at all* when sending mail; I'd like to be able to send mail to "Joe Blow" and have the computer worry about where his mailbox resides. If the mail system can do that for you, it's irrelevant whether the name of the target host is "seismo" or "seismo.css.gov" or whatever. -- Guy Harris {ihnp4, decvax, seismo, decwrl, ...}!sun!guy guy@sun.com (or guy@sun.arpa)