Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!mit-eddie!minya!jc
From: jc@minya.UUCP (John Chambers)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp
Subject: Re: Duplicate site names
Message-ID: <446@minya.UUCP>
Date: 5 Jan 88 03:21:27 GMT
References: <271@ontenv.UUCP> <7905@g.ms.uky.edu> <44208@beno.seismo.CSS.GOV> <22341@hi.unm.edu>
Organization: home
Lines: 26
Keywords: pathalias maps duplicates

> >Yeah, and it'll get a lot worse before it gets better.  Now I'm working at
> >a place that is installing all sorts of glorified terminals (Macs, IBM PCs,
> >Sun and Apollo diskless workstations) that each masquerade as a "host" and
> >need names.  Hundreds of them.  And this is just one company.
...
> NO, you get yourself a domain name (registered, of course).  Then you
> don't have to worry about conflicts with the outside world because your
> fully qualified hostname will be unique since the domain name will be
> unique.

Sorry, but you haven't been listening to the complaints from the users of
the various "tut" machines, some of which are properly hidden behind some
domainized gateways.

The basic scenario is that someone at Fubar University has their tut.edu 
down the line from fu.edu; I send them mail to ...!fu.edu!tut.edu!jrh;
the mailer at ... realizes there's a faster route to tut.edu than via
fu.edu and mails it to tut.edu over in Finland.

Proper domainizing doesn't help a bit here.  The real culprit is the
assumption of unique names.  This was a reasonable assumption back when
we had only a few thousand nodes to worry about.  It is doesn't work
so well as the number of nodes approaches 6 digits.

-- 
John Chambers <{adelie,ima,maynard,mit-eddie}!minya!{jc,root}> (617/484-6393)