[12478] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: About the creation of new 3-letter domain(s)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Noah Friedman)
Wed May 18 21:43:55 1994
Date: Wed, 18 May 94 10:00 EDT
From: friedman@gnu.ai.mit.edu (Noah Friedman)
To: dcrocker@mordor.stanford.edu
Cc: com-priv@psi.com, namedroppers@rs.internic.net
Reply-To: friedman@gnu.ai.mit.edu
In-Reply-To: <dcrocker@mordor.stanford.edu> Tue, 17 May 1994 08:31:07 -0700
>If you have an alternative proposal to my spec and believe that it will
>satisfy requirements for scaling, administration and use, then please do
>offer it.
My original proposal (which I sent to namedroppers; I'm not sure why you
wouldn't have gotten it) was similar to the one Jon Postel suggested
yesterday, except that I had suggested using letters instead of numbers in
the domain name. In particular, that the letters would be either the
first or last few letters of people's own domains, e.g.
*.fnord.f.n.pvt
I got this idea from seeing how MIT Project Athena arranged users' home
directories on their systems (e.g. /afs/athena.mit.edu/f/s/fsf). My own
group needs to start using it soon also because of limitations in the
number of links that can be made to a single file or directory.
>assignment -- a question of administrative ease
If people use this naming convention, there is a question of how to assign
administrators for those domains. I suspect it will rely on volunteering
to some extent (isn't this the case for geographic domains now?). Since
some letter pair frequencies are likely to be rare, perhaps several of them
could easily be handled by a single administrator.
Note that this proposal isn't mutually exclusive either with the current
geographic domain naming system (for those that don't mind using it) and
with other proposals, such as having commercial DNS managers give
subdomains out of their own "top-level" domains. I see no reason why we
need to adopt one system---multiple conventions are fine as long as they
all work.
This system doesn't resolve naming conflicts (e.g. if two people wanted the
subdomain "fnord" for themselves), but that is a problem in most naming
schemes. It could be avoided by letting either or both of the two
single letters to be arbitrary, but that makes remembering them more
difficult.
>use -- a question of mnemonic and typing ease
Single letters are relatively easy to type, and there's no real need to
remember them since they are the first (or last) letters of the user's
personal subdomain. I don't know whether first or last letters are better.
