Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!HOGG.CC.UOREGON.EDU!jqj
From: jqj@HOGG.CC.UOREGON.EDU
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re:  Domain name, domain name, what shalt thou be, domain name?
Message-ID: <8804111947.AA12194@hogg.cc.uoregon.edu>
Date: 11 Apr 88 19:47:44 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 16

>A name (even a domain name) can be arbitrarily bound to an address.
It is worth recalling one respect in which this is not quite accurate.

A typical site needs a simple way to generate an INADDR-ARPA database
from its name->address database.  A many-many map from SOA zones to
networks makes it hard to automate this generation.

I think it very undesirable to have lots of hosts with one authority
for their name->address translation and a different one for
address->name translation.  In some cases it's necessary, I suppose,
but the number of such hosts should be minimized so as to maximize the
modularity of the database.  A much cleaner scheme is to have a host's
real domain name directly depend upon its network number, and instead
have a pointer record in the other domain allowing an alias.  The
domain system as presently defined is sufficiently general to allow
both schemes; which one gets used becomes a question of taste and
pragmatics.