leiner@RIACS.ARPA (Barry Leiner) (10/16/85)
Folks, After watching the discussion recently on domains, it is apparent that there are some misconceptions and confusion about the current and planned state of affairs with respect to domains, milnet, etc. As the situation is fairly simple to understand, let me try to state it clearly. 1. There are two separable issues: domain names and domain servers. 2. The issue of domain names has to do with recognizing and being able to deal with names in the domain name format, i.e. ...@host.D1.D2.D3 where Dx are domains and subdomains. a. The current policy is that ALL hosts on the internet MUST be able to deal with such names. That is, they must have a way of recognizing such names and converting such names to internet addresses. b. There are two ways of doing this. The first and "current" (as of last year) is to simply have host names in that format be the entries in the host.txt table. The second method is to use the domain server approach (see below). 3. The issue of domain servers has to do with the method for conversion of names to addresses. a. The "official" position is that the milnet/DDN side of the world will be supported by the NIC generating a HOST.TXT file that contains all such names (or at least as many as they are prepared to deal with at any time) and providing this table to the milnet/DDN hosts. (This allows such hosts to continue to operate with minimal (non-zero) change. The hosts that are not supported otherwise by the name server system will be considered by the name server system to all be in a single top level domain with server at the NIC. The name of this domain is TBD, but will probably evolve from .ARPA to something like .DDN . b. The "research" side of the world (roughly those hosts on the ARpanet side of the mail bridges, rather than the milnet side), are expected to use the domain servers to convert host names to internet addresses. c. Hosts on the milnet side of the world are allowed to use domain servers and be part of a domain, and in fact are encouraged to do so, as that is the only way they can expect to reach all internet hosts. Bottom line: ALL HOSTS MUST DEAL WITH DOMAIN STYLE NAMES IF YOU WANT TO BE ABLE TO DEAL WITH ALL HOSTS, YOU MUST USE NAME SERVER SYSTEM. Hope this helps. Barry ----------