lauren@vortex.UUCP (Lauren Weinstein) (02/14/84)
Actually, it has been determined that regardless of any possible domain/ sitename naming conventions, the underlying 7 (or 6, depending on your point of view) character sitename should be unique throughout the entire top level UUCP domain. In other words, only one site named "foo234" should ever show up in a UUCP spool dir across the entire UUCP universe. Assuming 6 chars (thanks to System V UUCP) and the use of A-Z, 0-9, -, _ as characters, well over 3 BILLION combinations are possible, and there are lotsa good names in there!. All sorts of horrid problems occur with direct mail routing if duplicate underlying sitenames are allowed to appear, particularly since many sites (probably the majority of sites) will be unable to run full domain software, or any domain software at all for that matter. There are going to be 10's of 1000's of small sites that fall into this catagory, quite soon. I won't go into this any farther here -- this discussion is already taking place in detail within another forum. I will shortly be making an official announcement regarding the "official" Global UUCP Sitename Registry, which will exist primarily to help ensure that the underlying names are registered in an orderly manner to help promote (and not impede) future use of the network. This registry will be operated by vortex in conjunction and coordination with the ongoing mapping efforts of cbosgd!ksh and parsec!kolstad. Stay tuned. --Lauren--