ZBEN@umd2.ARPA (07/16/86)
From: mark@cbpavo.cbosgd.att.com (Mark Horton) > Based on my experience on UUCP, you can fan out a lot wider than 50-100. > I've seen fanouts of 1000 with no serious problems, although beyond > that may be getting iffy. Since the top couple levels give no idea > of what net to forward to anyway, I'm not sure that difference in fanout > buys you anything technically. On the other hand, keeping the names > short so people won't mind typing them is important. Which would you > rather send to: mark@cbosgd.ATT.COM, or mark@d.osg.cb.btl.att.com? > The latter describes the organizational heirarchy better, but... I don't want to get into a 7+-2 discussion. That some cognitive limit exists is more important than the actual number. The 50-100 number probably came from some obscure RFC or net.mail posting or something. But remember the whole domain thing came about because maintaining the "one true list" got to be such an administrative bear. I'm not sure I understand your comment about the top couple of levels giving no information - I thought you had to go all the way to the final nameserver before you had ANY routing information... I would much rather type cbosgd.ATT.COM than d.osg.cb.btl.att.com but I see the wave of the future being personal databases to associate these things with short personal IDs anyway (c.f. IBM NAMES). I have all your data saved under the name HORTON - let me pull it in here: ---- To: Mark Horton <cbpavo.cbosgd.ATT.UUCP!mark@seismo.CSS.GOV> ---- Some of the other ones have phone numbers, snailmail addresses, etc. Given this kind of facility the question of how much the user has to type becomes much less important. The cost of these schemes is the gore of changing all those entries out there when you change the name of your machine or move to a new one. > ...that's before every "Two-Guys-From-Italy-Pizza" starts to connect in. One of the best pizza places in this Kingdom is called "Three Brothers". It really is these three brothers from Italy you see... :-) ------ umd5.UUCP {seismo!umcp-cs,ihnp4!rlgvax}!cvl!umd5!zben Ben Cranston zben @ umd2.UMD.EDU <= Kingdom of Merryland Sperrows 1100/92 umd2.BITNET "via HASP with RSCS"