taylor@glasgow.UUCP (02/19/86)
In article <122@delftcc.UUCP> sam@delftcc.UUCP writes: >Finally, a couple of miscellaneous items. > >First, another question: that of private names. RFC 822 says that you >can leave off the domain part of your destination site name if it is the >same as your own. I don't remember how this works in a routing spec. >Anyway, suppose I am mailing from site "a.WOMBAT.EDU" (also on the UUCP >network) to site "x.WOMBAT.EDU". If I mail to "user@x", RFC 822 says it >should go to "x.WOMBAT.EDU". No problem so far. But there is an actual >site "x" on the UUCP network. Where should a letter to "x!user" go, >"x.UUCP" or "x.WOMBAT.EDU"? There are frustrating name collision >problems inherent in merging domains and the flat and/or relative UUCP >namespace. > As I understand the concept of domain naming ( not ARPA or JANET or UUCP naming specifically), you should only attempt to be 'in' one naming scheme - if you try to be in two schemes there is no reason why any name should give the expected result. If you decide to be a member of the ARPA name scheme (name scheme, not net) then x means x.a.wombat.edu or x.wombat.edu or x.edu whichever your name scheme identifies, with that order of priorities. To name the site called 'site named x in the UUCP name scheme' you first need to cross into the UUCP namespace. The convention developing seems to be to have a pseudodomain .UUCP in the ARPA namespace; hence uucp's x is called x.UUCP . However this appears to me to be syntactic sugar for explicitly crossing a gateway into the UUCP namespace; the software recognises .UUCP as a special case and transforms x.UUCP into x@uucp - which by the rules above means x@uucp.a.wombat.edu , where uucp.a.wombat.edu is the local gateway's name (in the ARPA namespace, since that is where your machines are). If you decide to be a member of the UUCP name scheme, then x *is* the uucp site you call x ( ie, one of the set of uucp sites called x; probably that member of the set which is closest to you). If you wish to send to a site in the ARPA name scheme, you need first to address a gateway to that namespace, so x.wombat.edu's name from uucp will be of the form arpa!x.wombat.edu However if the pseudogateway 'arpa' is mounted on one of your machines, it's name will presumably be a.wombat.edu *in the ARPA namescheme* so you could send it the address arpa!x and it would then be able to expand the 'x' to 'x.a.wombat.edu' or 'x.edu' etc as appropriate. ------ I would greatly appreciate constructive comment on the above ... -Jem. JANET: taylor%glasgow.uucp@uk.ac.ed.cstvax -o Jemima UUCP: { uk }!cstvax!glasgow.uucp!taylor (==). Puddleduck