Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcvax!ukc!dcl-cs!aber-cs!pcg
From: pcg@aber-cs.UUCP (Piercarlo Grandi)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp
Subject: Re: registering UUCP sites
Summary: domains are not routes; routes still needed, etc...
Message-ID: <266@aber-cs.UUCP>
Date: 24 Nov 88 15:54:38 GMT
References: <1165@fig.bbn.com> <124@minya.UUCP> <1218@fig.bbn.com> <12649@steinmetz.ge.com>
Reply-To: pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk (Piercarlo Grandi)
Distribution: eunet,world
Organization: CS Dept., University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, UK
Lines: 103
X-Disclaimer: Any statement is purely personal.

In article <12649@steinmetz.ge.com> davidsen@crdos1.UUCP (bill
davidsen) writes:

      What organization? With the advent of cheap unix-pcs and <$300
    versions of UNIX which include uucp, there are thousands of sites
    which are not in an organization. Or more accurately they are in
    usenet. If there were no usenet maps, I would agree that no one
    should look for a free lunch and ask that maps be created. Given
    that the information is there, why not treat .uucp as an
    organization?

This is of great interest to me, as I had and will have just one of
those cheapo unixes at home.

Actually, usenet maps are abolutely necessary. Usenet is a voluntary,
cooperative, no obligations network. There must be a way to know how to
reach another site, and the best way is for everybody to publish their
links in some sort of directory; this implies that everybody is giving
everybody permission to use them as a relay, in exchange for the same
privilege.

    I mean, everybody but AT&T, that wants everybody to believe they
    are a leaf node... There are others that do cheat, trying to
    masquerade as leaf nodes, but thank goodness this is not terribly
    widespread.  The problem of what you do in a cooperative
    environment when everybody takes advantage of your connectivity is
    real, and the only solution so far is the uunet one (i.e. you get a
    bit less cooperative).

      Domains were intended to be a solution, not a religion. The idea
    that some domains be formed to represent organizations is obvious;
    group all of the GE sites as a whole and call us something.ge.com
    and let GE handle delivery. This has nothing to do with geographic
    location, just connectivity.

Actually, bangistas and domainistas are two factions that will be
forever at odds, like blanco and colorado parties in latin american
countries :-).

Domains, in their strictest interpretation, have nothing to do with
either location o connectivity; they just provide some means to help
generate unique names, and keep lists of them. Associating
routers/nameservers or gateways (the two are different things) with
levels of the domain tree maybe a convenience, but is not mandatory at
all. In other words, a domainista world can be as flat an address space
as you want.

I do not see why ever bangistas would be opposed to domain based
NAMING.

    In my opinion the  best possible world is one in which every
    machine has a domain based name, bang routing is used, and every
    machine on the bang route undertakes to do its best to get the
    message to the next machine, and NO more than that. In this way
    people that like other guys do routing for them would say

	a.b.c.d!user

    and the local map would turn that to

	e.f!a.b.c.d!user

    and e.f would turn that into

	g.h!a.b.c.d!user

    and so on, each stage adding only the name of the next stage;
    people that do prefer source routing would specify as complete a
    path as they can think of with their maps, and all nodes in between
    would only optimize the path to the next element in it. If any
    stage were to know of any gateway into a domain, if one existed,
    they could make use of that.

    This organization would allow the full continuum between static and
    dynamic routing, and between hierarchical, gateway based, and flat,
    map based, oath finding.

      The .us domain is purely geographic, and there is little reason
      to think that sites in the same area would be in some way
    connected. Trying to use location as a domain is for the
    gratification of domain gurus, since there is no reason to think
    that sixwbn.albany.ny.us would even know that bilzvax.albany.ny.us
    exists. That is, machines are allowed to *register* but there seems
    to be no reason to believe that they can connect.

Exactly! the point is that domains need not have gateways at all (ehr,
in my opinion, certinaly not in that of the guys that run the
internet).  Domains are quite useful exactly to allow orderly
registration and cataloging of unique names.

      How much better, then, to use .uucp as the domain for the
      usenet.

By virtue of the discussion above, no. Using .uucp simply reproduces
the problem of generating unique names easily. Unless of course you
mean to have subdomains under .uucp; but then it has been persuasively
argued that top levels that are network names ought to disappear (the
crucial points are that networks are paths, and you can be connected to
many networks).
-- 
Piercarlo "Peter" Grandi			INET: pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk
Sw.Eng. Group, Dept. of Computer Science	UUCP: ...!mcvax!ukc!aber-cs!pcg
UCW, Penglais, Aberystwyth, WALES SY23 3BZ (UK)