[161018] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: looking for terminology recommendations concerning non-rooted
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Andrew Sullivan)
Fri Feb 22 13:02:04 2013
Date: Fri, 22 Feb 2013 13:01:49 -0500
From: Andrew Sullivan <asullivan@dyn.com>
To: nanog@nanog.org
In-Reply-To: <20130222055742.DE65A2FF4D49@drugs.dv.isc.org>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
On Fri, Feb 22, 2013 at 04:57:42PM +1100, Mark Andrews wrote:
>
> RFC 952 as modified by RFC 1123 describe the legal syntax of a hostname.
> There is no trailing period.
Mark is of course correct about this, but it doesn't fully help.
The basic problem is (as always) the confusion about the difference
between a hostname and a fully-qualified domain name, which so happens
to be also a hostname.
Whether we like it or not, this ambiguity is no longer something that
can be resolved. What you have to do is know whether you are dealing
with a hostname (no final dot, because the hostname syntax doesn't use
it), a domain name relative to the root (no final dot, because
implicitly you're not using the search path; it is nearly impossible
to tell the difference between this and a host name), a domain name
relative to something else, relying on your search path (bad, evil,
and wrong, just stop it or you get what you deserve), or an actually
fully-qualified domain name (final dot). The second of these is about
to get harder to distinguish from the third, because of the new gTLD
programme at ICANN.
I wish there were a neat answer to the problem. There isn't.
A
--
Andrew Sullivan
Dyn, Inc.
asullivan@dyn.com
v: +1 603 663 0448
