Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!lts!amanda@lts.UUCP
From: amanda@lts.UUCP (Amanda Walker)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re: Re: new terminal names
Message-ID: <02-May-89.181516@192.41.214.2>
Date: 2 May 89 22:07:26 GMT
References: <7080014@eecs.nwu.edu> <8YAj6Yy00UoJ41ApYV@andrew.cmu.edu>
Sender: news@lts.UUCP
Reply-To: amanda@lts.UUCP (Amanda Walker)
Organization: InterCon Systems Corporation, Sterling, VA
Lines: 32

In article <7080014@eecs.nwu.edu>, gore@eecs.nwu.edu (Jacob Gore) writes:
>If you are doing an FTP to foo.bar.edu, how does it help to know that the
>two name servers for bar.edu are a Timex/Sinclair and an IBM Selectric?
>
>Jacob Gore				Gore@EECS.NWU.Edu
>Northwestern Univ., EECS Dept.		{oddjob,chinet,att}!nucsrl!gore

Sigh.  It doesn't.  However, it helps a lot to know that foo.bar.edu
is running UNIX (for example), so that the FTP client can ask for
a long format directory listing, parse it, and find out useful things
like file size, whether or not a given file is really a directory, and
so on.  Since this sort of information is not provided by the FTP spec,
it must be determined in a OS-dependent fashion.  Since the OS involved
cannot usually be determined from the host itself (since most FTP servers
do not conform to the RFC by responding to the SYST command...), it's
very nice to be able to glean this information from the nameserver.

To take another example, it's quite useful for a mail transport program
to be able to find out where to send mail destined for zot.bar.edu,
even (or especially) if there is no direct path between said mail
transport program and zot.bar.edu.

Domain servers provide information about the domain and the hosts therein.
Addresses are part of this information.  Host OS and type information
is part it, too.  So is mail-handling information.

This discussion seems to be approaching ridiculousness...

--
Amanda Walker
InterCon Systems Corporation
amanda@lts.UUCP / lts!amanda@uunet.uu.net