Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!phri!roy From: roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith) Newsgroups: news.sysadmin Subject: Re: Stuck with .UUCP forever? Message-ID: <3787@phri.UUCP> Date: 28 May 89 23:47:46 GMT References: <1728@fig.bbn.com> <3790007@eecs.nwu.edu> <320@xdos.UUCP> <622@whizz.uucp> <3243@epimass.EPI.COM> Reply-To: roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith) Organization: Public Health Research Inst. (NY, NY) Lines: 26 In <3243@epimass.EPI.COM> jbuck@epimass.EPI.COM (Joe Buck) writes: > The technical problem is that the "UUCP domain" namespace is flat -- one > list must be kept with all the thousands of names, and it must be kept > free of duplicates. [...] On the other hand, I can name a new PC or > workstation here sierra.epi.com or toy-pc.epi.com without having some > remote bureaucracy approve, because I'm the domain administrator. Lest anybody think this is not a real problem (or, to put it another way, not a real advantage of the domain naming system), let me give you an example. We've got a machine here, wombat.phri.nyu.edu. A couple of weeks ago, while I was giving somebody the Grand Tour, I pointed to a rack of stuff in the corner and said "that's wombat, one of our file servers". He replied, "Oh, so *that's* where wombat is! I've sent a lot of mail through there, but never really knew where it was". This seemed odd, since nobody gets their mail on wombat, and it doesn't talk uucp, so nobody would be sending mail through it. It took me a while to realize that he didn't mean my wombat, but some other wombat. Presumably, there is one and only wombat.UUCP, and presumably that was the machine he was thinking of. Wombat being such a nice name, I'm sure there are several wombats in different domains scattered around the world. They all happily coexist, not knowing the they have namesakes in other domains, or caring. -- Roy Smith, System Administrator Public Health Research Institute {allegra,philabs,cmcl2,rutgers,hombre}!phri!roy -or- roy@phri.nyu.edu "The connector is the network"