sl@van-bc.UUCP (01/01/70)
In article <917@looking.UUCP> brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton) writes: >There is nothing wrong with having multiple logical addressing schemes. >There should be such. > >But one consistent scheme must always be present. That's the scheme you >use when you try and "figure out" how to mail somebody. No. The whole idea behind computer based routing is to be able to give someone a name (address) that you can send messages to. The mail system should be able to find out the *current* place to send those messages to and route them accordingly. > >If you wanted to get mail to somebody, what would be easiest to work out? >I maintain that this is the geographical scheme. Usually if you know one >thing about somebody, it's the town they live in. You need this if you want >to mail a postal letter, or find their phone number. Even if you already >know the number, the town is coded within it. > >This has nothing to do with the routing underneath. This is just how >I think we usually associate people. The problem here is that if you move then you must change your domain (address). If you have your domain independant of your physical address then there is a good chance that even in your new physical position your messages can still be sent to the same domain name (address). > >Sometimes you think of people as belonging to orgnanizations. "That's >John from Mitel" you might say. But you also probably know that Mitel's >main computer is in Ottawa. The emphasis with X.400 and X.DS has been and is organizational. This means that you can send letters to entities based on their position in an organization heirarchy based on organizational attributes (name, position, department, etc). You could (hopefully) even send messages like president@ATT.com, or qualitycontrol@ibm.com. These types of heirarchies do not map well to private individuals in their capacity as private citizens instead of their job's. This is probably because personal computers are just not as big a part of society in Europe as they are here. Especially when these standards were being developed (late seventies, early eighties). The emphasis then was on providing electronic mail for the people who had computers, business, and the result is quite workable there. Other types of heirarchies must be developed to support private citizens. Remember the emphasis should be on giving out domain names which allow some "n" way splitting at the top where n is a small integer (less than a thousand say). And such that they won't have to change their domain names very often, if ever. Wouldn't it be nice (well maybe) if your mail could find you wherever you are or go, for the rest of your life. No more change of address cards -- ever! One method which might work is your country and prov/stat of birth. E.g. Stuart.Lynne.man.ca Or (heaven forbid) you could use your S.I.N. or similiar number (drivers license). Stuart.Lynne.2845769.bc.can > >The one, consistent scheme that everybody understands is geography. >Organizational and company related schemes are haphazard and difficult to >follow. > >For far down the line, a geographical domain structure is the only way to >go. Now, while the number of email users is small, we can use other schemes >as we like, but they will damn us later. No, farther down the line, the probable method is a unique (world wide) number. The number would be unique and the sender would use hints to help mail servers find you. Stuart.Lynne 883-223-4111-a2-333 country=ca prov=bc city=vancouver Anyhow there is no clear direction right now about which is the *right* way to do things. We're still having too much fun experimenting. -- {ihnp4!alberta!ubc-vision,uunet}!van-bc!Stuart.Lynne Vancouver,BC,604-937-7532
rayan@utegc.UUCP (08/19/87)
The top level domain name is CA. Barring a miracle, second level subdomains will be institutional names. I.e. domain names will end in ...<myorg>.CA Many people, me included, do not agree on these choices. I can understand using the 2-letter code for the country (attempting to avoid future problems), but the choice of second-level names is unacceptable. Nevertheless, I/we as a community have very little clout where it counts (money, politics, 3-piece suits, formal meetings, etc.) so that won't make much of a difference when CDNNET and NetNorth want <myorg>.CA, and CDNNET administers the CA domain. At the moment, I think NetNorth is waiting for a reaction of some kind from its institutional member representatives, to a formal proposal before their Admin Committee to adopt <myorg>.CA. A similar proposal is supposed to be ratified at an upcoming CDNNET board meeting (or equivalent). Incidentally, these two networks are very chummy, and have observers at each other's meetings etc. This is good, but it shows that we aren't "playing the game" as it were. I have the impression these proposals will be accepted by the respective boards around the middle or end of september or so (barring a public outcry...). I have made it clear to the network reps, that having organizations at the second level is not prudent (to put it mildly), and that as the UUCP rep (i.e. with strong support from the UUCP community) I find such a scheme unacceptable. They seem to be aware of the controversy of their decision, but apparently aren't disturbed enough to reconsider it. They also claim 3 networks for their stance (CDNNET, NetNorth, DRENET), whereas DRENET has basically kept out of the frey, and is an observer. At the summer Usenix, a bunch of people - at a BOF discussing this matter - made the suggestion that the networks should put together a position paper describing the pros/cons of the various alternatives in objective terms (mutually refereed), and use it to start a discussion on the various forums. The reaction when I suggested this to the other reps, was that there was no point in wasting time starting from scratch (which wasn't the idea). In the meantime, most of the summer has gone by with very little action, mostly due to project pressures at CDNNET and holidays I imagine. I think a good public discussion could have started at the time. At the moment, there is a CA domain registered with the SRI NIC, there are two sort-of-registered subdomains in it: UBC.CA and MCGILL.CA. The McGill one was forced by them needing a domain for an Internet linkup. I suspect the UBC one is there because that's where CDNNET is strong. Registration procedures have not be decided yet. I'll let you all know when something concrete is in place. If you have opinions on this matter, please vent them to can.general. Part of the reason given for discounting the UUCP community's stance, was that there was no followup comments or discussion of a previous status report I posted to the net (not in can.general). That status report indicated things were going according to our wishes, so naturally there wasn't much comment (only a couple of positive notes). If you disagree with this <myorg>.CA business, if your site is on NetNorth or CDNNET, you can also help by going to the NetNorth and/or CDNNET rep at your site and express your concerns, and asking them to forward them. If you're not on those nets, feel free to post your thoughts here. I am not sure what they want to do about sites that aren't organizations or institutions. There were some mumblings about geographical subdomains, perhaps. Incidentally, I took a poll of site admins a few months back on this matter. These are the numerical results: In favour of: toplevel domain: --------------------------------------------------------------------- CA: 12 CAN: 46 type of 2nd-level domains: --------------------------------------------------------------------- institutional: 6 functional: 35 geographical: 1 functional + institutionala 2 geographical + institutional: 3 functional + geographical + institutional: 4 anything-but-institutional: 1 That's a 4:1 ratio in favour of CAN, and a 6:1 ratio for functional 2LDs. The first issue is largely emotional, the second very objective. I got many cogent thoughtful replies, thanks all. I tried as a last-ditch effort to stir up some discussion with the other network reps as a result of this info. Unfortunately, to no avail. I think they thought they had already decided. rayan (rayan@utai.uucp, rayan@ai.toronto.edu) -- Rayan Zachariassen AI group, University of Toronto
brian@ncrcan.UUCP (Brian Onn) (08/20/87)
I prefer .CAN as a top level domain myself. The domain .CA looks *too* much like California. Why was a two letter top level chosen anyways... all the major ones (ie .COM, .GOV, .EDU) are three letters now?
daveb@geac.UUCP (Brown) (08/20/87)
In article <8708190102.AA05431@ephemeral.ai.toronto.edu!
!rayan@utegc.UUCP writes: The top level domain name is CA. Barring a
!miracle, second level subdomains will be institutional names. I.e.
!domain names will end in ...myorg.CA
!... but the choice of second-level names is unacceptable. Nevertheless,
!I/we as a community have very little clout where it counts (money,
!politics, 3-piece suits, formal meetings, etc.) so that won't make
!much of a difference when CDNNET and NetNorth want <myorg.CA, and
!CDNNET administers the CA domain.
What is the policy of the dARPA NIC on subdomains in the U.S. and
in the ARPAnet proper? CDNNET and NetNorth may be shown to be ill-advised
if they elect to differ from either an explicit policy or a de-facto
standard.
--dave
--
David Collier-Brown. {mnetor|yetti|utgpu}!geac!daveb
Geac Computers International Inc., | Computer Science loses its
350 Steelcase Road,Markham, Ontario, | memory (if not its mind)
CANADA, L3R 1B3 (416) 475-0525 x3279 | every 6 months.rayan@utegc.UUCP (08/21/87)
To clarify a few points that have been mentioned here and in private mail: Registration inside .CA is 100% independent of the NIC. As long as they know who to point a finger at if something goes wrong, they don't care what the subdomains inside .CA are. If you register under .CA (which isn't yet possible, but hopefully will be), before you can start to use your shiny new domain name in mail you send out and in addresses you tell people about, the following must hold: First of all, other sites inside .CA must know how to get to your domain. Some sites will do as they do now, punt to a smarter neighbour. But most of the sites with multiple network links (i.e. non-leaf UUCP or NetNorth nodes for example), will need to know specific information about how to route to your domain. This means that routing information has to be distributed in some manner. We do this already with the UUCP map, but there is no mechanism (and for that matter, no standard software) available to deal with that within NetNorth or CDNNET, yet. If you are willing to accept inefficiencies in how mail gets from various sites to yours, the minimal requirement is that the gateways that contain authoritative information for CA must know about your domain. These gateways do not necessarily have any connection with the ARPA Internet nameservers, or the mail exchanger hosts referred to in them. The reason you probably want to get an MX record for your domain into a nameserver, is so that mail to you will take the 'best' route. It is possible for the entire country to be served by one MX record which directs all mail through a single gateway. However, that is not robust or efficient, and therefore isn't desirable. Right now, there are supposedly two MX records: one that sends UBC.CA via CSNET, and one that sends everything else (*.CA) to McGill. With two domains under .CA, this is ok. With 1000, McGill would get swamped. Back to what happens when you register. The registration process for .CA should take care of getting the right data into the right routing tables, and distributing it correctly. On your registration form, you may be required to list the various gateways you have links to, that have agreed to accept mail for your domain. It may be your responsibility to ensure these gateways know what to do with 'yourorg.CA', but I expect the global routing information to be maintained through the registration process. For example, if you are hooked up to uunet, you would ask them to send yourorg.CA mail your way, and then list UUNET.UU.NET as the MX host for your domain on the Internet. A mailer on NetNorth wanting to get to yourorg.CA should send the message to whatever gateway you have designated, that has agreed to handle your mail. The UUCP Zone doesn't enter the picture, except that you may be able to do the site registration by going through a "Canadian UUCP Zone" instead of dealing directly with the .CA registrar (similar to people going through "The UUCP Project" which manage a UUCP Zone, instead of dealing directly with the SRI-NIC). So, you ask, this is all well and good, but I'm not really interested in good connections with NetNorth or CDNNET since I never talk to anyone there. I am interested in efficient delivery from the Internet. What prevents me from setting this up right now? Before registration for .CA can start up in earnest, all NetNorth/BITNET/EARN, CDNNET, and UUCP hosts (that care), have to know about .CA and know at least one gateway. This means waiting for various routing data to get decided on and to propagate on the various networks (which will take 1-2 months...). Once that infrastructure is set up, sites can start using their registered domain name with impunity, if they ensure good connectivity and routing information for the portion of the world they are most interested in talking to. Incidentally, just because your network neighbours know how to send mail to 'yoursite' right now, doesn't mean they know what to do with 'yourorg.CA'. This is something each site will have to work out with its chosen mail forwarders. The NIC likes a (all too limited) set of functional domains (EDU,GOV,etc.). Each organization is a subdomain under one of these. What the NIC chose to do there has little relevance (by itself) to what is done in Canada. There is a .US domain reserved. Noone has registered in it yet (no-one has shown any interest). The tentative thought of the registrar for .US was that there would be a geographical subdivision (per-state e.g.). Many other countries have registered toplevel domains. Many of them use a functional division at the second level. Examples include Britain, Israel, Australia, Belgium, and Korea. Other countries have a flat namespace, e.g.: Sweden, Holland, Finland, Switzerland. The BITNET policy (which NetNorth asserts has nothing to do with them) is to strongly discourage a flat namespace within a country. Based on experience in UUCP-land, a flat namespace is easily manageable with a hundred hosts. It starts creaking at about 1000 hosts, and becomes impossible with 10000 or so *hosts*. Hosts have the luxury that they can have cryptic names without too many disadvantages. Domain names for sites should not be cryptic. In a flat namespace, domain names will start to look like Ham handles after a while. How'd you like to be foo@torcorp42.ca ? A functional namespace decreases this problem N-fold by inserting an intermediate subdomain level. In the ARPA Internet scheme, not much is gained because of the limited set of functional domains (6 or so, but 4 big ones -- GOV, MIL, EDU, and COM). That obviously doesn't help too much. In order to do any good, there needs to be dozens or even hundreds of these functional domains. Personally, I think this is the way to go. It will allow expansion of the namespace to cover (order of magnitude) 100000 sites. I think this is adequate in Canada for the foreseeable future (a couple of decades). When you get into the mega-site size, there's probably only one scheme which will survive -- geographically based domains. The phone and postal systems are good examples of these. That was the scale issue. The other is one of heterogeneity. You will note that CDNNET and NetNorth are both academic/research networks. As far as I can tell, they are being influenced by addressing ideas developed by people in other academic/research networks (in Germany & France). The members of these nets live in a very homogeneous world, where there are no businesses, no lawyers, no dental firms, no condominiums, no hospitals, etc., hooked up to their net. UUCP is at the other end of the spectrum, having probably the most heterogeneous population of any of the large networks. Birds of a feather tend to connect together -- this fact of network topology again indicates 'functional' domains are more natural. The members of the academic nets naturally fall into their own 'functional' domain. Secondly, the horizon of some of these networks is very short. When I talk about this domain issue as an important long term decision, I mean that we will have to live with the decisions we make today, 20-30 years down the road. Partly, that's because UUCP and the Internet has been around for an awful long time compared to e.g. NetNorth and CDNNET. To members of those nets, "long term" may mean 2 years down the road. In 2 years, a flat namespace probably won't be taxed too hardly, in 20 years it certainly will. I just got a piece of mail asking what the arguments against functional domains are, so I'll continue a bit longer. The arguments against functional domains are: 1. It has no place in the CCITT model of the world. X.DS, a vapourware directory service standard, will (according to present preliminary proposals) require a printable domain-name-like representation of X.400 addresses, that map more or less directly into the X.400 addressing model. I.e. <organization>.<location>.<country>. The <country> field must be the ISO Alpha-2(*) code for the country, <location> is a geographical qualifyer, and <organization> is a unique organization within that location. 2. It is not clear how to determine an authority for a functional domain. Suppose one sets up HOSPITALS.CA for hospitals, who will be responsible for it? There seems to be a notion of "legal" responsibility as a requirement, in the same sense that organizations have a clearly identifiable board, CEO, etc. 3. It is what the bad U.S. Military network uses. (I think that's it; someone correct me if I forgot something.) My rebuttals: 1. X.DS is not a standard yet (and probably won't be for a couple of years). It is also of little relevance. What *is* relevant is that there be a method of gatewaying mail between the X.400 world and the RFC world, and correspondingly a way of translating addresses from user@foo.bar.CA format to /C=CA/ADMD=CDNNET/PRMD=BAR/OU=FOO/ID=USER/ or similar X.400 semantics. Indeed, such a standard exists, it is called RFC987, and part of it states that the translation from domain name to X.400 address, and vice versa, is done by *table lookup*, in two *separate*, possibly assymmetrical, tables. I think that pretty much takes care of any compatibility issue. Two other small points. Even though X.400 is a standard, it isn't written in stone. It will evolve. If someone thinks there is something wrong with the standard, they can work to change it. X.DS isn't ratified yet (far from it), yet a description of a preliminary proposal for it was enough to make CDNNET change 180 degrees from a UUCP-like outlook to their present stance. I think they should instead have become active in the standards efforts and guided things in a more proper direction. 2. Authority in that sense is not important. The real authority lies with the registrar(s) of .CA who are in charge of distributing routing information to the various gateways. If some subdomain misbehaves, all external communication with that subdomain can be very effectively cut off at the gateways by purging the routes for that subdomain. That will be more than enough to solve the problem, either way. An orthogonal argument is: the same problem exists for geographical subdomains. Who will be the authority for BANFF.CA (for example). Do you go down to your local police station or public library to register a domain name? 3. To put it kindly, this is unfounded phobia. (*) about ISO Alpha-2 while I'm at it: The reasons for wanting .CA instead of .CAN are as follows: 1. The Internet domain name specification says country-level domains should be the ISO Alpha-2 code for the country. Of course, Britain, whose code is GB, are using UK instead. When the NIC was asked about this for Canada, they stated that they could see the reasons for not wanting CA, and would accept CAN if we wanted it (even though in retrospect they thought the UK decision was wrong). 2. X.400's internal address representation has two possible encodings for the country name; either the numeric country code (124 for Canada), or the printable ISO Alpha-2 (2-letter) code for the country. Note two things: RFC987 which specifies mapping between RFC822 and X.400, says that gateways translating into X.400 should use the numeric country code. Also, this is an internal, binary-coded, representation of an address. This says nothing about how people are going to see these things in a user interface. That is partly what X.DS is supposed to address, but I think country names will be spelled out in full in the local language anyway... it's the least you could expect if non-english-speaking natives are supposed to read these things. 3. CA is standard, and won't be confused with California. Many people think it will. Anyway, I'll give someone else the opportunity to talk. I know some CDNNET people read this group; I wish they would participate a bit more (at all, actually), perhaps give their point of view on things. rayan (rayan@utai.uucp, rayan@ai.toronto.edu) -- Rayan Zachariassen AI group, University of Toronto
sl@van-bc.UUCP (08/21/87)
In article <298@ncrcan.UUCP> brian@ncrcan.UUCP () writes: > >I prefer .CAN as a top level domain myself. The domain .CA looks *too* >much like California. Why was a two letter top level chosen anyways... all >the major ones (ie .COM, .GOV, .EDU) are three letters now? This is mainly due to the influence of X.400 and the efforts to follow the international standards. "CA" is the officially sanctioned abbreviation for Canada. (Of course it is also the officially sanctioned -- by US Post Office -- abbreviation for California.) While we are on the topic it might be noted that the use of Organizational 2nd level domain names is also due to X.400 related standards. Mainly in the directory service area. It allows the domain names that we choose to slide fairly easily into a directory server implemented to CCITT standards. One of the hot areas of X.400 work in North America is CDNet, based here in Vancouver at ean.ubc.cdn. If anyone "really" wants to know I can dig out the relavent numbers and names of standards. It's all pretty dry reading, and not of too much immediate importance. At least not until the US Internet Community gets a lot more interested in implementing them. At least for us in uucpland the NIC RFC's are much more important and useful. -- {ihnp4!alberta!ubc-vision,uunet}!van-bc!Stuart.Lynne Vancouver,BC,604-937-7532
lamy@utegc.UUCP (08/21/87)
Rayan's fears about namespace explosion are especially important wrt to
UUCP: thanks to Stuart I can now make my Mac into a UUCP node -- and
I would should I leave the academic environment. Small Unix systems and
MS-DOS systems already had that capability.
Given the nature of Canada, and the structure of the phone rates, it is
unlikely that a kitchen site would do much long-distance work, especially
when the bigger machines may speak UUCP over X.25 or be part of the Canadian
Internet. So we are likely to have geographical clusters, at least in the
UUCP clique.
In other words, I think geographical sub-domains should be registered as soon
as possible to host all the smaller machines. One per postal code is a bit
much. Cities might be nice, but provinces look about right for the moment.
the 1995 version?: Jean-Francois@jfl-ml.M4K1E9.on.can
(
Jean-Francois Lamy lamy@ai.toronto.edu (CSnet,UUCP,Bitnet)
AI Group, Dept of Computer Science lamy@ai.toronto.cdn (EAN X.400)
University of Toronto, Canada M5S 1A4 {seismo,watmath}!ai.toronto.edu!lamy
)sl@van-bc.UUCP (08/21/87)
In article <8708211151.AA16007@ephemeral.ai.toronto.edu> lamy@ai.toronto.edu (Jean-Francois Lamy) writes: > >Rayan's fears about namespace explosion are especially important wrt to >UUCP: thanks to Stuart I can now make my Mac into a UUCP node -- and >I would should I leave the academic environment. Small Unix systems and >MS-DOS systems already had that capability. While there is going to be an explosion in the number of sites, I don't think that there is going to be a corresponding explosion in the namespace. While potentially every PC in Canada with a modem will *eventually* become a site, *very* few will want/need to have a 2nd level domain name. For example given the current example of the uucp zone in the US, it costs about $150 US per year to have a 2nd level domain name. Thats a bit steep for you average pc oriented site. Most are going to opt to join a domain park and be satisfied with a 3rd or even 4th level domain name at a much reduced price. That's what I'm trying to do in Vancouver. I would like to setup a 2nd level domain called vnet.ca. This domain would handle all mail traffic for small sites in the Lower Mainland. At the same time I'm setting up links to UUNET with a Telebit Trailblazer to get a very low cost method of getting mail and news to/from the US. We operate on a cost plus basis, passing the cost of these services back to the people using them. In this manner the people who reside in vnet.ca can (no pun intended) have a very low cost and robust mail system, which they can use to interact with other uucp type users, arpa and even cdn... type users. >Given the nature of Canada, and the structure of the phone rates, it is >unlikely that a kitchen site would do much long-distance work, especially >when the bigger machines may speak UUCP over X.25 or be part of the Canadian >Internet. So we are likely to have geographical clusters, at least in the >UUCP clique. Actually your average IBM PC can use X.25 now. With the Hayes 2400 modem and Hayes Smartcomm III. Datapac also has dial in X.25 ports. Presto.. instant access to the rest of Canada. Personally I think that the Trailblazers are the only way to go. PS. Who else in Canada is looking at these things? I would like to get some connections to eastern canada ( almost everywhere is eastern canada from here ), for mail links. If I can deliver direct it saves you downloading from UUNET after I upload it. >In other words, I think geographical sub-domains should be registered as soon >as possible to host all the smaller machines. One per postal code is a bit >much. Cities might be nice, but provinces look about right for the moment. This is my preference as well. The only problem is that it may have problems in who would run them. I have an aversion to government / big business setting up to do so. And I don't know that we have the right to usurp that type of namespace -- although it doesn't mean we couldn't try. > > >the 1995 version?: Jean-Francois@jfl-ml.M4K1E9.on.can > my 1995 version?: Stuart.Lynne@van-bc.V3H1S1.bc.can -- {ihnp4!alberta!ubc-vision,uunet}!van-bc!Stuart.Lynne Vancouver,BC,604-937-7532
lyndon@ncc.UUCP (08/22/87)
In article <1251@van-bc.UUCP>, sl@van-bc.UUCP (Stuart Lynne) writes: > In article <298@ncrcan.UUCP> brian@ncrcan.UUCP () writes: > > > >I prefer .CAN as a top level domain myself. The domain .CA looks *too* > >much like California. Why was a two letter top level chosen anyways... all > >the major ones (ie .COM, .GOV, .EDU) are three letters now? I *think* I *might* agree, but if we all start to use .CA it will become second nature in short order (I DO like .CAN, but I ALSO agree with adopting international standards just to maintain consistency [RS-232? tee hee!]) > This is mainly due to the influence of X.400 and the efforts to follow the > international standards. "CA" is the officially sanctioned abbreviation for > Canada. (Of course it is also the officially sanctioned -- by US Post Office > -- abbreviation for California.) TRUE! But ONLY in the U.S.A. The ISO standard *should* (does?) have the ultimate say here. > While we are on the topic it might be noted that the use of Organizational > 2nd level domain names is also due to X.400 related standards. Mainly in the > directory service area. It allows the domain names that we choose to slide > fairly easily into a directory server implemented to CCITT standards. NO! 2'nd level domain space is controlled ONLY by the 1st level domain... (Whatever that organization may be) CCITT or RFCxxx be damned! > One of the hot areas of X.400 work in North America is CDNet, based here in > Vancouver at ean.ubc.cdn. This is true. I have a lot of respect for what the EAN people are doing, However, they are NOT the OFFICIAL representatives of the .CA domain in my mind, in that they have not consulted me or any of my associates who are part of the "UUCP Domain." > If anyone "really" wants to know I can dig out the relavent numbers and > names of standards. It's all pretty dry reading, and not of too much immediate > importance. At least not until the US Internet Community gets a lot more > interested in implementing them. > > At least for us in uucpland the NIC RFC's are much more important and > useful. Again, this is a valid statement. The question at hand is "Who, within the Canadian 'Internet' community is going to act as the Official representative to SRI, or whoever???" CDNNet no doubt has some valid concerns, as may many other "networks" (such as APSSNet) may have. I am interested in seeing our little "network" have some type of representation in the development of .CA, as I am sure people in BITNET and other networks are also. I don't want to pick on a certain organizaation, but it seems that the CDNNet reps are attacking (not a good word?) SRI and others as if they are the de facto body speaking on behalf of all of us in Canada. I do not think this is the case. I certainly do not think this SHOULD be the case. With the recent discussion on the concept of TCNET, it might be worthwhile to sit back and discuss the idea of a Canadian mail [and news???] network, and examine the ramifications of building such a netowrk, before anything is engraved in stone. FOR THE RECORD, I *LIKE* the idea of .CAN, but I also HATE going against international standards. My "vote" is for .CA for that reason. (And ONLY for that reason). I do not believe .CDN, .EARN, or anyone deserve status as a top level domain. Perhaps .CDN.NET has merit, or .EARN.NET, but that's as far as it goes...
lyndon@ncc.UUCP (08/22/87)
In article <8708211151.AA16007@ephemeral.ai.toronto.edu>, lamy@ai.toronto.edu (Jean-Francois Lamy) writes: > > Rayan's fears about namespace explosion are especially important wrt to > UUCP: thanks to Stuart I can now make my Mac into a UUCP node -- and > I would should I leave the academic environment. Small Unix systems and > MS-DOS systems already had that capability. This is why Rick Adams and others speak of "park domains", where a site agrees to handle a number of "small" machines under their present domain. The naming convention is currently very awkward... > Given the nature of Canada, and the structure of the phone rates, it is > unlikely that a kitchen site would do much long-distance work, especially > when the bigger machines may speak UUCP over X.25 or be part of the Canadian > Internet. So we are likely to have geographical clusters, at least in the > UUCP clique. Speaking on behalf of a kitchen site I can agree with this! The introduction of X.25 to the USENET community has not hurt anything. It's unfortunate that it costs me $1.00/minute to call pyramid when they can call me for $.22/minute. > In other words, I think geographical sub-domains should be registered as soon > as possible to host all the smaller machines. One per postal code is a bit > much. Cities might be nice, but provinces look about right for the moment. I think geographical "domains" are a contradiction in terms. A domain has to relate to an address, not a ROUTE. Fortunately, pathalias and the UUCP maps allow us to fudge things for now, but there is a MUCH LARGER problem to be addressed here: Where is it that we actually live (within the global name space)? I "live" at 'lyndon@ncc.uucp' right now. I *could* be living at 'lyndon@auvax.uucp', or maybe lyndon%ncc.uucp@auvax.cdn'. Of course I can ALWAYS be reached at 'lyndon@pembina.alberta.cdn' (except when the EAN software doesn't like me). And then there's alberta!ncc!lyndon and pyramid!ncc!lyndon and winfree!ncc!lyndon, etc... The ONLY reason for .COM, .EDU. et al is that there are too damn many nodes in the good old USofA to reasonably fit under one top level domain such as '.US' We don't have to emulate that.
lamy@utegc.UUCP (08/22/87)
In article <54@ncc.UUCP> lyndon@ncc.UUCP (Lyndon Nerenberg) writes: >I think geographical "domains" are a contradiction in terms. A domain has >to relate to an address, not a ROUTE. The geographical position of a site implies nothing about how to get there. Indeed, it might be the case that a nameserver for .QUE would route mail for Hull through Toronto and Ottawa. I was just claiming that kitchen sites would mostly entertain local connections and keeping administration of the names closer to the users sounds nice. I prefer geographical subdomains to "pool" or "park" names like vnet.ca or netnorth.ca that feel closely tied with a route. Jean-Francois Lamy lamy@ai.toronto.edu (CSnet,UUCP,Bitnet) AI Group, Dept of Computer Science lamy@ai.toronto.cdn (EAN X.400) University of Toronto, Canada M5S 1A4 {seismo,watmath}!ai.toronto.edu!lamy
sl@van-bc.UUCP (08/23/87)
In article <54@ncc.UUCP> lyndon@ncc.UUCP (Lyndon Nerenberg) writes: >In article <8708211151.AA16007@ephemeral.ai.toronto.edu>, lamy@ai.toronto.edu (Jean-Francois Lamy) writes: >> In other words, I think geographical sub-domains should be registered as soon >> as possible to host all the smaller machines. One per postal code is a bit >> much. Cities might be nice, but provinces look about right for the moment. >I think geographical "domains" are a contradiction in terms. A domain has >to relate to an address, not a ROUTE. Fortunately, pathalias and the UUCP maps >allow us to fudge things for now, but there is a MUCH LARGER problem to be Hold on a bit. You're perhaps reading a bit more into domains than what they were originally intended to do. For example if you review the opening paragraphs of RFC920: "Domains are administrative entities." "There are no geographical, topological, or technological constraints on a domain." "Most of the requirements and limitations on domains are designed to ensure responsible administration." Clearly the emphasis is totally on keeping the name explosion manageable. It is far easier for NIC (for example, we can have our own CNIC when needed) to manage only a couple of thousand 2nd level domains and let each of them administer their own sub-domains. For example it lets NIC advoid having to know about all of the sub-domains in .ATT.COM or .IBM.COM. If the people responsible for administering a domain want to make the names geographically based, then that's ok. If they want to go with functional names, that's ok too. If they want to go with organizational names, well fine. The basic premise is "responsible administration". -- {ihnp4!alberta!ubc-vision,uunet}!van-bc!Stuart.Lynne Vancouver,BC,604-937-7532
sl@van-bc.UUCP (08/23/87)
In article <53@ncc.UUCP> lyndon@ncc.UUCP (Lyndon Nerenberg) writes: >> This is mainly due to the influence of X.400 and the efforts to follow the >> international standards. "CA" is the officially sanctioned abbreviation for >> Canada. (Of course it is also the officially sanctioned -- by US Post Office >> -- abbreviation for California.) >TRUE! But ONLY in the U.S.A. The ISO standard *should* (does?) have >the ultimate say here. Funny the last time *I* mailed something to: xyz corp 999-234 Rancho Rd. Santa Barbera CA 95222 It arrived. Seems the Canadian post office agrees with the US post office :-) -- {ihnp4!alberta!ubc-vision,uunet}!van-bc!Stuart.Lynne Vancouver,BC,604-937-7532
brad@looking.UUCP (08/23/87)
The scheme the NIC people selected is brain dead. But it's hard to change now. There is nothing wrong with having multiple logical addressing schemes. There should be such. But one consistent scheme must always be present. That's the scheme you use when you try and "figure out" how to mail somebody. If you wanted to get mail to somebody, what would be easiest to work out? I maintain that this is the geographical scheme. Usually if you know one thing about somebody, it's the town they live in. You need this if you want to mail a postal letter, or find their phone number. Even if you already know the number, the town is coded within it. This has nothing to do with the routing underneath. This is just how I think we usually associate people. Sometimes you think of people as belonging to orgnanizations. "That's John from Mitel" you might say. But you also probably know that Mitel's main computer is in Ottawa. The one, consistent scheme that everybody understands is geography. Organizational and company related schemes are haphazard and difficult to follow. For far down the line, a geographical domain structure is the only way to go. Now, while the number of email users is small, we can use other schemes as we like, but they will damn us later. Think about it: If you could redisign the Canada Post addressing scheme right now (ignoring Postal Codes), and things like routing and post offices were not a problem, how would you do it? This is how email should be addressed, too. -- Brad Templeton, Looking Glass Software Ltd. - Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473
rbutterworth@orchid.UUCP (08/24/87)
In article <917@looking.UUCP>, brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton) writes: > Think about it: If you could redisign the Canada Post addressing scheme > right now (ignoring Postal Codes), and things like routing and post offices > were not a problem, how would you do it? This is how email should be addressed, > too. I'd simply send mail to a person's Social-Insurance-Number, which would be issued at birth, upon receiving landed-immigrant status, or upon incorporation of course :-). The postal sorting machines could look up and imprint the routing to the geographical location automatically. Never again would I have to send out all those change-of-address notifications. Of course, if we're redesigning things, we might as well change the appearance of the SIN too. 9 digits is a little awkward to remember for each person you might want to mail to. If we were to go for say three letters and four digits that would allow for over 175 million individuals in the country, and most people could refer to each other informally by their three letter prefix. e.g. if you knew THX1138 well you could call him Thex.
brad@looking.UUCP (08/24/87)
In article <1263@van-bc.UUCP> sl@van-bc.UUCP (Stuart Lynne) writes: > >No, farther down the line, the probable method is a unique (world wide) >number. > >The number would be unique and the sender would use hints to help mail >servers find you. Yukko. No wonder there is distrust of computers by the general public. Why on Earth would we want numbers when strings would serve the same purpose? If a user already knows your "magic number" then he is not trying to figure out how to mail you. He knows. You are correct that there should be one unique, time invariant ID for everybody, but god forbid that it be a number. The whole point is that all the schemes should exist at once. Some will be very efficient routing-wise, and some will be less so. The efficient ones will get used in any long term mail conversation, since mailers will (perhaps invisibly) use them as reply addresses. It's that all important first message that is important, and we want as many naming schemes as possible to work. Both geographical and organizational are good. The only problem with "organizational" is that there are too many organizations in the world to have them in a top level domain. You have to break it down a bit to make it easier to understand and handle. Sure something like AT&T is big enough, but how about Joe's consulting? For the long term you need a hierarchy to break things down, and geography is the only one people already understand. But please, NO NUMBERS -- Brad Templeton, Looking Glass Software Ltd. - Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473
ptrubey@clan.UUCP (Phil Trubey) (08/30/87)
Why *do* some people so vehemently want functional second level subdomains? I have yet to be involved in this debate, but I'll throw in my two cents worth anyways. Lacking arguments pro and con, I'll make some up and see where that leaves me... 1) If functional 2nd level subdomains were not used, the 2nd level name space would grow too large and become chaotic. If the idea is to use the same functional names as used in the US, (.EDU, .COM, .NET) then not much 'organization' is being bought. .NET will typically contain few organizations, thus spliting the name space into two sections. Hardly an improvement. What *is* the proposal for second level subdomains? 2) Other countries are using functional 2nd level subdomains. 3) ??? Personally I would favour the organizational 2nd level subdomain as it makes mail addresses a manageable size. If functional naming were used, a typical address here would look like, ptrubey@clan.systems.carleton.edu.ca kind of long winded. And for a really large organization that wants 4 levels for itself (like AT&T in the states), it starts to look silly ... bang paths were shorter. I realize that the objective is not to produce short mail addresses, but to impose a clean, rational structure to mail addressing. However, practical aspects should be thought of in addition to the theoretical. I'd be interested in seeing what other people thought... By the way, is the US going to continue using several top level domains, or has there been any thought of creating a .US top level domain? I didn't think so... Phil Trubey School of Computer Science, Carleton University CDNnet: ptrubey@systems.carleton.cdn Internet, ARPA: ptrubey%carleton.bitnet@wiscvm.wisc.edu BITNET: ptrubey@carleton.bitnet UUCP: ptrubey@clan.uucp ( ..!watmath!clan!ptrubey)
scott@utgpu.UUCP (08/31/87)
In article <10352@orchid.waterloo.edu> rbutterworth@orchid.waterloo.edu (Ray Butterworth) writes: > >I'd simply send mail to a person's Social-Insurance-Number, which >would be issued at birth, upon receiving landed-immigrant status, >or upon incorporation of course :-). The postal sorting machines Sorry but the SIN isn't issued at birth. I didn't get one till I was 17 and I didn't have to then (of course have fun getting a job without one :-) scott