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Path: utzoo!utgpu!utcsri!utegc!utai!ubc-vision!alberta!ers!ncc!lyndon
From: lyndon@ncc.UUCP
Newsgroups: can.general
Subject: Re: Status of Canadian domain
Message-ID: <54@ncc.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 22-Aug-87 05:38:14 EDT
Article-I.D.: ncc.54
Posted: Sat Aug 22 05:38:14 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 23-Aug-87 10:15:03 EDT
References: <8708190102.AA05431@ephemeral.ai.toronto.edu> <298@ncrcan.UUCP> <8708211151.AA16007@ephemeral.ai.toronto.edu>
Distribution: can
Organization: Nexus Computing Corp.
Lines: 39

In article <8708211151.AA16007@ephemeral.ai.toronto.edu>, lamy@ai.toronto.edu (Jean-Francois Lamy) writes:
> 
> Rayan's fears about namespace explosion are especially important wrt to
> UUCP: thanks to Stuart I can now make my Mac into a UUCP node -- and
> I would should I leave the academic environment.  Small Unix systems and
> MS-DOS systems already had that capability.

This is why Rick Adams and others speak of "park domains", where
a site agrees to handle a number of "small" machines under their
present domain. The naming convention is currently very awkward...

> Given the nature of Canada, and the structure of the phone rates, it is
> unlikely that a kitchen site would do much long-distance work, especially
> when the bigger machines may speak UUCP over X.25 or be part of the Canadian
> Internet.  So we are likely to have geographical clusters, at least in the
> UUCP clique.

Speaking on behalf of a kitchen site I can agree with this! The introduction
of X.25 to the USENET community has not hurt anything. It's unfortunate
that it costs me $1.00/minute to call pyramid when they can call me for
$.22/minute.
  
> In other words, I think geographical sub-domains should be registered as soon
> as possible to host all the smaller machines.  One per postal code is a bit
> much.  Cities might be nice, but provinces look about right for the moment.

I think geographical "domains" are a contradiction in terms. A domain has
to relate to an address, not a ROUTE. Fortunately, pathalias and the UUCP maps
allow us to fudge things for now, but there is a MUCH LARGER problem to be
addressed here: Where is it that we actually live (within the global
name space)? I "live" at 'lyndon@ncc.uucp' right now. I *could* be
living at 'lyndon@auvax.uucp', or maybe lyndon%ncc.uucp@auvax.cdn'.
Of course I can ALWAYS be reached at 'lyndon@pembina.alberta.cdn' (except
when the EAN software doesn't like me). And then there's alberta!ncc!lyndon
and pyramid!ncc!lyndon and winfree!ncc!lyndon, etc...

The ONLY reason for .COM, .EDU. et al is that there are too damn many
nodes in the good old USofA to reasonably fit under one top level
domain such as '.US'  We don't have to emulate that.