hokey@plus5.UUCP (Hokey) (07/21/85)
In article <55500002@hpfclo.UUCP> jad@hpfclo.UUCP (jad) writes: > An example of what I'd like to see: > if I want to get mail here (say, at hpfclo.FC.HP.COM), > someone should be able to send to hpfclo.COM from anywhere. > If their host does not know hpfclo, it routes to the nearest > .COM smarter_neighbor ... who knows that hpfclo.FC.HP is in > the .HP subdomain, and sends to the .HP smarter_neighbor, > who sends to the .FC smarter_neighbor, who sends to me. The problem is that the official name of your site, hpfclo, is (in your example) hpfclo.fc.hp.com, and it is *WRONG* to accept hpfclo.com as an alias, because I plan on registering that very name to stand for a new company, "Hokey's Potatoe chips with Food Coloring Left Out", and I aim to get that name registered ahead of you! One of the major purposes of having a domain tree is to permit names which would otherwise be duplicates to be disambiguated by their full domain name. This means the machine named "ra" at Sun Microsystems, UCSD, and Somewhere in the UK are all permitted to be called ra because they could live unambigously under higher-level domain. If you meant hpfclo.fc.hp.com where you said hpfclo.com, never mind! In any event, you missed a couple of steps. Failing to find hpfclo.fc.hp.com in the local tables, the search would continue with fc.hp.com. If that failed, the next step would be to search for hp.com, and finally, com. Unless, of course, you just pass along the mail to a smarter mailer. -- Hokey ..ihnp4!plus5!hokey 314-725-9492