eichelbe@nadc.arpa (01/22/87)
Can anyone tell me why the host table which I get from SRI-NIC is so much smaller all of a sudden? And what has happened to all the Rutgers hosts and how can I reach RU-RED now? Thanks. eichelbe@NADC.ARPA
lear@aramis.UUCP (01/22/87)
Can anyone tell me why the host table which I get from SRI-NIC
is so much smaller all of a sudden? And what has happened to
all the Rutgers hosts and how can I reach RU-RED now?
RU-RED is officially RED.RUTGERS.EDU at 128.6.4.2. You can get all our
addresses by contacting the nameserver (RUTGERS.EDU) at 128.6.4.7.
Red doesn't really speak uucpish but one of our hosts (rutgers or topaz,
I'm not sure which) will fake it.
...eliot
--
[lear@rutgers.rutgers.edu]
[{harvard|pyrnj|seismo|ihnp4}!rutgers!lear]hedrick@topaz.UUCP (01/26/87)
NIC has been directed by DCA to remove all non-domain nicknames from the host table. In order to explain this, I have to give you some context. The plan is that eventually the host table will go away completely. It turns out that there are just too many hosts for anybody to keep track anymore. So the host table is being replaced by a set of name servers. As you may have noticed, official Internet names now have all these dots, e.g. borax.lcs.mit.edu. The new format of host name is designed to be evaluated by talking to a system of name servers, rather than using a host table. The idea is that when you see borax.lcs.mit.edu, you first contact a "root" server and ask it who EDU is. The root server returns the address of the server for EDU. You then ask EDU who MIT is. That gives you the address of the MIT server. You then ask it who LCS is, etc. (There are duplicate servers at each level.) Once this system is working properly, in theory NIC will no longer maintain a host table at all. The subroutines that used to look up names in /etc/hosts (gethostbyname and gethostbyaddr) are simply replaced by subroutines that query the system of name servers. In the interim, the NIC host table is just a subset. We only register hosts with them that we think will be doing a lot of business with the outside. If everybody registered all their hosts, the host table would be impractically large. (Indeed for many machines, it is already too large to be practical.) Now, to your question. Until recently, NIC's host table included non-domain nicknames. E.g. red.rutgers.edu, which you ask about, used to be called ru-red. In the days before all those dots, people tended to choose names with their institutions built in, e.g. ru-red, cmua, su-score, mit-ai. When domains started, we changed the primary names to follow the new conventions, e.g. red.rutgers.edu, a.cs.cmu.edu, score.stanford.edu, ai.ai.mit.edu. (Obviously it would be redundant to have ru-red.rutgers.edu.) But we left the old names around to help transition. The edict has now gone out that all of the old names are to be purged. Thus the host table will be getting shorter, and you will have to start using the full form of the name. I have various reservations about the new scheme, but at least you now know what is happening.