jeh@simpact.com (09/26/89)
Can anyone define what constitutes a legal uucp hostname?
As it says in my sig., I have something to do with the VMS implementation of
uucp that's available through DECUS. A neighbor of one of our sites recently
decided that, since their Internet domain name (call it foo.bar), period and
all, was just seven characters long, they'd use that for their uucp hostname
too! (Yes, they were sending \020Shere=foo.bar\000)
Naturally, this broke all kinds of filename-generating assumptions in our
code. VMS can't tolerate more than one period in a file name.
Sure enough, I can't find anything written anywhere that prohibits periods in
uucp hostnames, though it certainly isn't common. Hyphens I see all the time
(and we can handle easily), but periods?
This particular site has changed their mind and is now just using "foo" for
their uucp name, so the immediate problem has gone away. But for the future...
We can roll with this particular punch via filename translation -- we're doing
some of that already, it's not much trouble to extend it to allow for this.
But before we commit to the design for the next release, I'd like to know:
Just what else can appear in a hostname? What maximum length? And so on.
--- Jamie Hanrahan, Simpact Associates, San Diego CA
Chair, VMSnet [DECUS uucp] and Internals Working Groups, DECUS VAX Systems SIG
Internet: jeh@simpact.com, or if that fails, jeh@crash.cts.com
Uucp: ...{crash,scubed,decwrl}!simpact!jeh