Xref: utzoo news.sysadmin:2181 news.admin:5109 news.groups:7989
Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!purdue!decwrl!fernwood!asylum!romkey
From: romkey@asylum.SF.CA.US (John Romkey)
Newsgroups: news.sysadmin,news.admin,news.groups
Subject: Re: CALL FOR VOTE, COMP.INTERNET.ADDR AND COMP.INTERNET
Message-ID: <1156@asylum.SF.CA.US>
Date: 13 Mar 89 18:49:43 GMT
References: <2078@pikes.Colorado.EDU>
Reply-To: romkey@asylum.UUCP (John Romkey,The Asylum)
Organization: The Asylum; Belmont, CA
Lines: 84

In article <2078@pikes.Colorado.EDU> netnews@pikes.Colorado.EDU (Robert M. Sklar) writes:
>
>	With the growing number of machines that are part of the Internet,
>and the fact that such machines have to have their name and node numbers
>to be reached on the internet, I am making a proposal that a Internet group
>be created.  
>
>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.

No. This will not work, and you also should not want to do it.

First off, any discussions of the Internet fall in line nicely with
comp.protocols.tcp-ip. That newsgroup is gatewayed to the Internet
TCP/IP mailing list. That is where most discussions about the Internet
are held, except the ones by the IETF (Internet Engineering Task
Force), which are generally held on IETF-specific mailing lists which
are not gatewayed to the USENET.

Second, there are probably >100,000 hosts on the Internet. I think
you'll be unhappy about the volume of this proposed group if it
succeeds (which it won't, for reasons third and fourth below).

Third, there exists no central list of hosts on the Internet and no
way to require new hosts to be listed on this group. That's because
there already exist mechanisms which the Internet uses to keep track
of such things.

Fourth, only hosts on the Internet need to know the IP addresses of
other hosts on the Internet to reach them. Hosts off the Internet
(much of the USENET) need only the names; they address whatever it is
to the appropriate name through some sort of USENET-to-Internet
gateway (generally, this is only done for mail) and that gateway
translates the name. The name translation is done via a distributed,
replicated database which is accessed by the Domain name protocol
described in various Internet RFC's. We've been doing this for several
years now; if a system doesn't implement this protocol, it doesn't
belong on the Internet.

Here's more info on this system for those who are curious:

The central host table got to be too big a long time ago; fortunately,
the problem was recognized in time and the transition was made. The
domains you see on the USENET (like asylum.sf.ca.us) are an echo of
the domains you see on the Internet. For machines that are exclusively
on the USENET, these domain names are reserved in the Internet domain
namespace, but have only entries saying "forward all mail for this
domain-name to this other domain-name" (MX records).

The domain name database is distributed by breaking it up along the
dots in names. For instance, take xx.lcs.mit.edu. There is a name
server, which is replicated about five or six times (last time I
checked) which knows all the domains in .edu (same for .com, .gov,
.mil, .org, .net and others). It knows which computers are responsible
for providing name service for .mit.edu. There are several of these
computers; they know which other computers are responsible for
.lcs.mit.edu. You carry this on as far as you need, and you end up
with the responsiblity and burden of dealing registering host names
and maintaining host tables falling on the people who own the hosts,
rather than a central authority.

The name server approach used by the Internet is not directly
applicable to the USENET, because on the USENET you can only talk to
your neighbors, making it diffcult to set up distributed servers in
this fashion. If the USENET continues to grow, which I expect it to,
despite rumours of its imminent death, eventually the maps which are
distirbuted over comp.mail.maps will become too burdensome for many
systems to deal with, and I expect that some sort of reorganization
will occur in order to deal with it. One of the interesting things
about the USENET (in a network sense rather than a content sense) is
that these changes tend to occur in an organic, evolutionary way.

Anyhow, comp.internet.addr is a bad idea and shouldn't be bothered
with. The other group, comp.internet, might be useful for a more
general discussion of the world wide internet of which the Internet is
but a part, but this is usually covered in the various comp.mail
groups, and a group with that intenet would be best named
comp.worldnet or comp.matrix.
-- 
			- john romkey
USENET/UUCP: romkey@asylum.sf.ca.us	Internet: romkey@xx.lcs.mit.edu
"Can you find me soft asylum..." - The Doors