Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!topaz.rutgers.edu!ron
From: ron@topaz.rutgers.edu (Ron Natalie)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.headers
Subject: Re: trying multiple addresses
Message-ID: <18081@topaz.rutgers.edu>
Date: 15 Feb 88 16:02:21 GMT
References: <11828@brl-adm.ARPA>
Organization: The Office of Mismanagement and Bean Counting
Lines: 25

I'm not sure which packet charges you are referring to.  Surely this presents
a problem on the IP over X.25 PDN, but if we actually had an IP (or the ISO
equivelent) surely some more equitable charging for non-completed calls would
previal.

Second, one of the major reasons for network failure these days is routing
dysfunction.  Consider RUTGERS, a typical University network, we have two
paths to the outside world.  The first is through the traditional ARPANET
connection.  The other is via our NSF regional net to the NSFNet.  Routing
is such that I usually had a 50-50 chance of getting to the University of
MD by either route (Mimsy had a MILNET interface and a UMDNet->NSFNet i/f).
Somedays the ARPANET/MILNET would be so poor we couldn't get connections
through, someday our REGIONAL would be broken, some days there were NSF
problems (the above are in decreasing order of probability by the way).

Routing is a sticky issue,  while there are people spending a lot of time
working on that, introducing this info into the already burdened domain
system is not likely the answer.  Routing techonology needs to progress
so that a host has a decent way of finding out which address in the set
of addresses returned by the name server is likely to work.

None of this is actually a mail question (it's just where we notice it
a lot) so I suggest you move this discussion to some other mailing list.

-Ron