lee@west44.UUCP (Lee McLoughlin) (02/24/84)
Is uppercase allowed in a site name on Usenet/Eunet?
The simple answer I though was: yes. But I have recently been
installing a large mail system which after finding the next node
to deliver a message to lowerfy's (there word not mine) the node
name. Now, working on the belief that the authors know what they
are up to I was wondering if there is some obscure net convention
that Usenet/Eunet sites use only lower case?
Offhand I cannot think of any sites with such a name and sites
on the ARPA and JNT networks seem to convert their names to lower
case before using them on the Usenet/Eunet!
Thanks in advance.
PS: Please reply to ukc!lmcl as mail gets here weeks before reaching
west44 via ukc!root44!west44.
--
Lee McLoughlin ....!ukc!root44!west44!lee
....!ukc!lmclmark@cbosgd.UUCP (Mark Horton) (02/24/84)
Upper or mixed case UUCP site names are discouraged. The reasons are that (1) 4.1BSD's delivermail squashes everything to lower case, and if the system is called Shasta, it won't be able to figure out where to send mail addressed to shasta; (2) people are easily confused and tend to reproduce case differences incorrectly; (3) RFC822 specifies that upper and lower case are supposed to be the same, that is, case is ignored in host names. There are some sites currently using upper case UUCP host names. Here is a list of those I know about: AT2a Ciprnet D1355 Fnatte-Vax GESS GLOBE GWII Glacier IM60 MAC001 NW1 ODA3B ODA3b Olympus PWB1 SW1A Shasta VisiVax WE9unix WIN All of these sites have trouble getting mail. There will shortly be a UUCP site name registry. The conventions it will allow are as follows: The first 6 characters must be unique lower case letters, digits, dash, and underline allowed In general, upper case may be used as long as measures are taken to ensure that the lower cased version of the name will also work. Such measures are quite difficult, so upper case is a bad idea. Mark Horton