[12627] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: About the creation of new 3-letter domain(s)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Barney Wolff)
Tue May 24 21:03:48 1994
Date: Tue, 24 May 94 14:17 EDT
From: Barney Wolff <barney@databus.com>
To: bzs@world.std.com (Barry Shein)
Cc: com-priv@psi.com
> Date: Tue, 24 May 1994 12:46:11 -0400
> From: bzs@world.std.com (Barry Shein)
>
> I don't understand your example, what's the relationship between
> 002.1234.5678 and 987.6543.5678? I don't think there's any confusion
> caused by caching, there's really no difference between this scheme
> and the one we currently use, other than we're trying to make some
> provision for entering domains in either order unambiguously.
I assert, without proof, that any scheme for new domains which requires
modified software in every host connected to the Internet is simply
unworkable. Therefore we cannot expect that users will be able to enter
phone-based domains in natural order - because the software on the host
will attempt to use cached information from a lookup of 002.1234.5678 in
processing a lookup of 987.6543.5678, and get it wrong.
It's not even as though the old software will produce an error message
which clearly says to the user that he needs to reverse the phone number -
it will just say that the domain does not exist.
One could wish that prescient gods of naming had made the hierarchy left-
to-right, but we're stuck with it just as we're stuck with qwerty.
Any new system is certainly allowed to require modifications to its own
name servers. And we could at least contemplate with only mild distress
the notion of modifying all the root nameservers. To go beyond that,
to require that *every* nameserver be modified, or *every host* is just
not on, imho.
Yes, IPng will require that every host eventually be modified - perhaps.
It would not astonish me if we're still seeing IPv4-only hosts attached
to the Internet 10 years from now, behind NAT boxes, probably. Show us
how the phone scheme can work without host mods, and it becomes far more
interesting.
Barney Wolff <barney@databus.com>
