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From: mark@cbosgd.UUCP
Newsgroups: news.sysadmin
Subject: Re: UUCP domains (and a few misunderstandings)
Message-ID: <3437@cbosgd.ATT.COM>
Date: Thu, 5-Mar-87 15:06:01 EST
Article-I.D.: cbosgd.3437
Posted: Thu Mar  5 15:06:01 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 7-Mar-87 00:27:54 EST
References: <145@tdi2.UUCP>
Distribution: world
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Columbus, Oh
Lines: 44

This whole issue was hashed out pretty completely years ago.
At one time there were proposals on the table that looked a lot like
what you describe.

The basic problems with this proposal are as follows:

(1) It involves the creation of a bunch of new top level domains such
as OH, specicially for UUCP.  The NIC wouldn't go for that, and they
control the root registry.  (OH.US would be possible, however, but it
would have to be shared with other networks.)

(2) It's specific to UUCP.  One of the major features of domains is that
a host or organization can be on more than one network, and have the
same address no matter what network the sender is on.  Sort of like
having the same phone number no matter which long distance carriers
you use.  This makes it very important to be consistent with what the
rest of the world is doing.

(3) It's geographic.  While geographic domains are appealing at first
glance, they turn out to be inappropriate for two reasons: real network
topology isn't geographic, it's a question of who has the best UUCP links.
Also, there are many organizations that have more than one location.
It's messy to have to be ATT.NJ and ATT.OH and ATT.IL and ...  The
emphasis has instead been on organizationally structured domains.

A year ago representatives of major US networks (ARPA, CSNET, BITNET,
and UUCP) sat down and hashed this out.  We came up with an agreement
to share the COM, EDU, GOV, MIL, ORG, and NET domains, in order to
provide a common addressing space.  This has been in place and working
for several months now.  Thus, .COM is not an ARPA domain, it's a domain
of companies, run by the NIC, and shared among these 4 networks.

HP.COM is a domain registered on the ARPA side, and is not registered
with UUCP (although they could easily do so if they wished.)  At the
highest level, it doesn't matter what network they are on, mail to
user@host.HP.COM gets routed to the appropriate network (ARPA in their
case) and delivered appropriately, assuming it's working properly on
the ARPA side.

Public domain software for UUCP to handle domains has been available
for several months.  Both smail and uumail can do this.  They have
been posted to mod.sources and can be found in the mod.sources archive.

	Mark Horton