Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cwjcc!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!att!chinet!les
From: les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp
Subject: Re: Domain Registration (was Re: rewriting FROM: lines)
Message-ID: <8577@chinet.chi.il.us>
Date: 29 May 89 04:17:45 GMT
References: <5794@microsoft.UUCP> <3400012@eecs.nwu.edu>
Reply-To: les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell)
Organization: Chinet - Public Access Unix
Lines: 49

In article <3400012@eecs.nwu.edu> gore@eecs.nwu.edu (Jacob Gore) writes:

>>  a!x.y.z!b!you  (replace ! with your favorite character)

>(That's not an address, it's the end of a path.  Your correspondent would
>still need to figure out how to get to 'a'.)

Yes, that's what I meant -- I'd like to see a standard for tacking paths
onto both ends of a domain address.

>>would mean for the local machine to send to machine a (which it must
>>know about).  Machine a forwards to x.y.z by its choice of methods.
>>Machine x.y.z forwards to the machine b that it knows about,

>HOLD IT -- how does 'x.y.z' "know about" 'b' if 'b' is not in the maps?

B might be a direct neighbor, but no one but x.y.z needs to know *how*,
and only the person who says his address is x.y.z!b!person needs to
know that x.y.z is a forwarder.  I can't see this as being any more
difficult than becoming b.x.y.z!person or person@b.x.y.z which depends
on your relationship with x.y.z and generates extra work for thousands
of machines that will probably never send mail to b.

>If I call it 'b.c' instead and register it with the domain name service, I
>just need to tell whatever nameserver on the net is handling the '.c'
>domain the new information.  'me@b.c' before the move, 'me@b.c' after the
>move. 

Are you really going to get a 2nd level domain for your single-user machine?
How long will it take before an average uucp site will generate the new
path to you?  I'd prefer to notify people of the change if I cared about
getting their mail.

>The domain naming scheme is there to make it possible to have a distributed
>(as opposed to simply duplicated) database.  You say that 'x.y.z' knows
>about 'b'?  Fine.  Then you have two options: give 'b' a domain name so
>that 'x.y.z' can share that knowledge with other sites, or you go and
>share it with every one of your correspondents.

But off the Internet the database is simply duplicated (if we are lucky).
I don't mind sharing the knowledge that x.y.z forwards to b with every
one of my correspondents.  That is, I don't see an address like x.y.z!b!me
as being any more difficult to use (or any more ambiguous) than me@b.x.y.z,
and I don't think anyone is going to give me a 2nd level domain to simplify
it.  The problem is that it doesn't work if the sender wants to resolve the
end point instead of accepting the senders indication that x.y.z will
forward.

Les Mikesell