mark@cbosgd.UUCP (Mark Horton) (05/16/86)
Effective with next month's posting, we're going to adopt the dotted domain convention that the most recent (Jan 86) pathalias uses for the UUCP maps. This means that all domains will begin with a dot. For example, the old ucbvax = "Berkeley.EDU" becomes ucbvax = ".Berkeley.EDU" (The quotes really aren't necessary anymore, they are there for upward compatibility with the Jan 85 pathalias, so you can just as well use this.) ucbvax = .Berkeley.EDU Note that this applies to all domains, not to LAN names. (If you are putting your LAN name on the map, chances are something is wrong; unless there is a good reason for the whole world to know the name of every PC on your LAN as an unqualified name, please take your LANs off the published map and put them into your private additions used as input to pathalias.) For the most part, you'll know it's a domain because it ends in COM, EDU, GOV, or the 2 letter abbreviation of a country. Other domains, which are being phased out, end in ARPA, CSNET, BITNET, UUCP, CDN, and so on - names of actual networks. The version of smail to be posted soon supports both dotted and undotted domains, but it prefers dotted domains. So, while things won't fall apart if the whole world doesn't convert at once, it's still a good idea to send us your latest map, with dots in any domain names. We'll take care of the u.Path.* files ourselves. If you are running software that uses domain names that doesn't know about dots, you'll need to make some provision. (The change to smail was simple, just check with a dot before checking without a dot, for each level in the domain tree.) Even if you don't have any domain names in your entry, this is a good time to send us an updated map entry if you haven't sent one in recently. Mark