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From: spaf@cs.purdue.edu (Gene Spafford)
Newsgroups: news.sysadmin,news.admin,news.groups
Subject: Re: CALL FOR VOTE, COMP.INTERNET.ADDR AND COMP.INTERNET
Message-ID: <6227@medusa.cs.purdue.edu>
Date: 13 Mar 89 00:49:47 GMT
References: <2078@pikes.Colorado.EDU>
Sender: news@cs.purdue.EDU
Reply-To: spaf@cs.purdue.edu (Gene Spafford)
Organization: Department of Computer Science, Purdue University
Lines: 31

In article <2078@pikes.Colorado.EDU> netnews@pikes.Colorado.EDU (Robert M. Sklar) writes:
>
>comp.internet	General Internet related discussions of interest
>comp.internet.addr - simular to comp.mail.maps where a monthly posting of the
>most up to date hosts table would be published and changed in Internet address
>can be posted throughout the month.

Gee, the NIC gave this up themselves because of the volume.  There are
over 60,000 sites reachable by IP on the Internet, and that changes
quite a lot.  Let's see, assume a really simply name and number format:
foo.bar.com  129.200.92.100
That's about 30 characters per site (excluding aliases and network
info) times 60,000 sites -- over 1.8Mb per month.  And that isn't even addressing
the fact that there is no one place that contains all that info in a form that could
be posted.

>Part of the reason I even suggest this is we have had problems in the delay
>factor fo a university or organization changing their Internet address and
>the time it takes for others to find this out, while mail, news, etc is
>spooling up for days even weeks.

That's a good reason to be using nameserver software.  Updates are effectively
instantaneous when this is done correctly.


Obviously, I think the groups are unneeded and impractical.
-- 
Gene Spafford
NSF/Purdue/U of Florida  Software Engineering Research Center,
Dept. of Computer Sciences, Purdue University, W. Lafayette IN 47907-2004
Internet:  spaf@cs.purdue.edu	uucp:	...!{decwrl,gatech,ucbvax}!purdue!spaf