wales@CS.UCLA.EDU (Rich Wales) (07/10/90)
Regarding Jon Postel's message to the NAMEDROPPERS list: The country codes are to be taken from the list in ISO-3166 which was set up in 1981. In that list the two letter code for Czechoslovakia is CS. As I understand it, many people in the UK (where they use "big-endian" domain names that start with the top level) are concerned about what will happen if "CS" does become a top-level domain -- since this will presumably break the heuristics their gateways use to determine if a domain name needs to be reversed. (For example, consider a certain university in the US, whose computer science department uses the domain name "CS.UCLA.EDU". How are the UK mail relays going to know that this is not in fact a reverse-ordered form of a Czechoslovakian domain name "EDU.UCLA.CS"? What's the current thinking on this? I suppose someone could try and suggest that everyone help the UK out by abandoning the use of "CS" as a bottom-level domain -- but, realistically, this is unlikely to occur. Is this the straw that is going to break the back of the UK's domain name ordering, and force them to switch to "bottom-level-first" now, rather than try to "stick it out" until X.400 takes over the world? -- Rich Wales <wales@CS.UCLA.EDU> // UCLA Computer Science Department 3531 Boelter Hall // Los Angeles, CA 90024-1596 // +1 (213) 825-5683 "This is yet another example of how our actions have random results."
pb@computer-lab.cambridge.ac.uk (Piete Brooks, Postmaster) (07/10/90)
> Is this the straw that is going to break the back of the UK's domain > name ordering, and force them to switch to "bottom-level-first" now, > rather than try to "stick it out" until X.400 takes over the world? * Absolutely NOTHING stands ANY chance at all of changing the "official" UK * order. * Their statement is that there is no big/little endian problem. * All addresses is the UK are in UK order, and all gateways simply flip * addresses on the way through. * What we (the UK) really need is a way of dumping the DNS (to which 99.9% of * us do not have access, and the 0.1% which does has an aversion to using) * so that we could at least know all second level domains. * That way cs.ucla.edu would get a two domain match, whereas edu.ucla.cs would * only get one. * [ Here's hoping my mail doesn't go via Chile ! * [ My "short form" address is uk.ac.cam.cl ] * ]
lazear@GATEWAY.MITRE.ORG (07/10/90)
It would seem that this is an example of where a translating, application-level gateway is required: to map between one naming convention and another. Sure, it's nice if you can do it by inspection (user@host vs /c=uk/o=btc/pn=pjones/), but when the forms are very close, you need to have more infrastructure to make the break a clean one. There are gateways between BITNET and CSNET and MILNET, and the similarities in name formats are sorted out there. But the end user needs to aim the message at the gateway...it doesn't get there by magic. Perhaps it's time to bite the bullet and admit that there needs to be a more formal interface between the UK scheme and the rest of the Internet? Or, as was suggested, perhaps the UK scheme needs to be dropped in favor of "harmonization" of the domain name system. Walt Lazear
Craig_Everhart@TRANSARC.COM (07/10/90)
Why would you want to know ``all second level domains''? What's the difference? Sounds like you're still doing heuristics on domain-name order. Why? Craig
john@mintaka.mlb.semi.harris.com (John M. Blasik) (07/11/90)
wales@CS.UCLA.EDU (Rich Wales) writes: >What's the current thinking on this? I suppose someone could try and >suggest that everyone help the UK out by abandoning the use of "CS" as >a bottom-level domain -- but, realistically, this is unlikely to occur. maybe they should ask Czechoslovakia to use "GB" since the UK doesn't need it. from ISO 3166: United Kingdom GB GBR 826 john
pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk (Piercarlo Grandi) (07/22/90)
In article <9007101320.AA03269@dockside.mitre.org> lazear@GATEWAY.MITRE.ORG writes: Perhaps it's time to bite the bullet and admit that there needs to be a more formal interface between the UK scheme and the rest of the Internet? The problem that many USA and GB alike people seem to constantly forget is that JANET and PSS ar *not* on the Internet in any sense of the world. They are not part of the Internet, period. The fact that a Janet address looks like an Internet address with the domains in reverse order is entirely (well, almost) coincidental. The fact that in the Internet the top level domain country code is GB for the United Kingdom and CS for Czechoslovakia has no relevance whatever for Janet and PSS, whose name spaces are administered by the NRS according to rules that are not the Internet ones, even if there are points of contact and similarities, that however engender a lot of confusion. When I see discussions by people quoting RFCs and wishing that everybody conform to them, e.g. register in the DNS, etc..., they seem to constantly forget that the Internet is *one* net, even if the largest. If the people on the Internet harbor the delusion that everybody must respect the relevant RFCs, or else, they will lose connectivity with not just the UUCP world, but also the UK, BITNET, and many others. The next step in the evolution of the Internet is to recognize that there are many Internets, and not only you want to link together many networks running the same homogenous set of protocols and conventions, but also heterogenous ones, e.g. at least: Internet UUCP BITNET Janet/PSS DECnet On the other hand I wish that we all belonged to the Internet. I'd much have preferred an XNS based, rather than a TCP/IP based, Internet, but alas -- this is an impossible dream. What I sure do not want to see, and I semm not to be alone as apparently many sites are migrating as quickly away from it as they can, is an ISO/GOSIP based Internet taking shape -- things like Janet (i.e. its protocols) are a relic of the past. Still, the practical point is that the Internet is most convenient, yet it is not the only internet around. -- Piercarlo "Peter" Grandi | ARPA: pcg%cs.aber.ac.uk@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk Dept of CS, UCW Aberystwyth | UUCP: ...!mcsun!ukc!aber-cs!pcg Penglais, Aberystwyth SY23 3BZ, UK | INET: pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk
thorinn@DIKU.DK (Lars Henrik Mathiesen) (07/23/90)
Piercarlo Grandi <pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk> writes:
The fact that in the Internet the top level domain country code is GB
for the United Kingdom and CS for Czechoslovakia has no relevance
whatever for Janet and PSS, ...
There are two points that I have been waiting for someone to raise;
both concern the gatewaying between Janet and the Internet, where the
facts above do have relevance.
1) Why are Janet addresses converted into the DNS toplevel domain uk,
when it probably should be gb according to the discussion here?
2) Do the gateways accept ``wrong-format'' addresses from either side
--- that is, stuff like pcg%uk.ac.aber.cs@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk coming
from the Internet, or someone@uprague.cs from the Janet? If not, why
worry about cs as a country code?
As a point of interest: How does mail to (and from) random countries
navigate the Janet? Do all the corresponding top-level names exist in
Janet's naming scheme, do all the mailers have hacks to send the
stuff, or do the gateways encapsulate the offending addresses with
something like the %-hack?
--
Lars Mathiesen, DIKU, U of Copenhagen, Denmark [uunet!]mcsun!diku!thorinn
Institute of Datalogy -- we're scientists, not engineers. thorinn@diku.dkenag@ifi.uio.no (Erik Naggum) (07/23/90)
I'm not entirely certain how happy I am about things in the UK in general, but when we get major confusion from that island, it bugs me. A few points, since I don't have time to tackle all the confusion in Piercarlo Grandi's article. In article <PCG.90Jul22172454@thor.cs.aber.ac.uk>, pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk (Piercarlo Grandi) writes: > The problem that many USA and GB alike people seem to constantly > forget is that JANET and PSS ar *not* on the Internet in any sense > of the world. "word", presumably. You are not connected to the Internet proper with Internet (IP-level) addresses. You are, however, reachable from the Internet through relevant gateways. This means that these gateway are on the Internet and have to follow Internet rules on one side and whatever local conventions you have on the other side. > The fact that in the Internet the top level domain country code is GB > for the United Kingdom It's my understanding of the issue that the national top level domain is "UK" for the United Kingdom. ISO 3166, which is the basis for top level domain names in the Internet, specifies "GB". It's also my understanding that it was the then administrators of NRS or whatever who decided to implement their own hack with respect to domain names, and ignore ISO 3166. > When I see discussions by people quoting RFCs and wishing that > everybody conform to them, e.g. register in the DNS, etc..., they seem > to constantly forget that the Internet is *one* net, even if the > largest. If you want to talk to or with the Internet, follow Internet rules. It's as simple as that. If you continue to insist that you should be allowed to follow whatever rules you fancy on the Internet, you will have to be taken off the net, either by force from the Internet side, or by default, since you won't be reachable. The DNS registration is to ensure that we can talk to you. There's nothing wrong in adver- tising one gateway to the entire United Kingdom and let the gateways take care of addressing failures, but it will create a hell of a demand on the gateways, and cause large amounts of traffic which could be avoided by better registration. > If the people on the Internet harbor the delusion that everybody must > respect the relevant RFCs, or else, they will lose connectivity with not > just the UUCP world, but also the UK, BITNET, and many others. I believe you harbor the delusion that Internet RFCs are relevant off the Internet. This is hardly the Internet's fault. Internet RFCs are very relevant _on_ the Internet. People who think otherwise will lose connectivity. Personally, I don't think it would such a tragic loss to lose connectivity with the UK, but that's beside the point. > The next step in the evolution of the Internet is to recognize that > there are many Internets, and not only you want to link together many > networks running the same homogenous set of protocols and conventions, > but also heterogenous ones, e.g. at least: [list deleted] This is largely achieved by having gateways that accept and follow the rules of both the networks they're on. You seem to think that the Internet should accept all sorts of standards, and have failed to grasp the idea of a gateway. This is not the Internet's fault, either. There is one Internet. There are other interoperating networks, which are not called "the Internet". Your confusion may be based on this assumption, as well. > On the other hand I wish that we all belonged to the Internet. I'd > much have preferred an XNS based, rather than a TCP/IP based, > Internet, but alas -- this is an impossible dream. You are free to attempt to get acceptance for a system of inter- connected XNS based networks any time. Those of us who have worked with IP and TCP at the detail level find that they form some of the very best in networking protocols available. Compared to the OSI stuff, well, let's not compare it to the OSI stuff. > What I sure do not want to see, and I [seem] not to be alone as > apparently many sites are migrating as quickly away from it as they > can, is an ISO/GOSIP based Internet taking shape -- things like > Janet (i.e. its protocols) are a relic of the past. Still, the > practical point is that the Internet is most convenient, yet it is > not the only internet around. This doesn't scan well. Are you saying that many sites are migrating as quickly away from ISO/GOSIP networks as they can? I wasn't aware of any ISO/GOSIP networks that any site could migrate away from to begin with, and it seems to me that this ISO/GOSIP stuff is being mi- grated _to_ by people who want to win contracts with the GOSIP folks. I know I would be very happy to be wrong, but the trade rags haven't made me feel that way for a long time. (In fact, I got unhappy with most trade rags when the IBM PC caught on, but that's another story.) The technical issues in this discussion are based on an annoying in- sistence upon misunderstanding the design of the Internet. The Inter- net side has been very accomodating, as I see it, and gets nothing but flak from people varying from slightly to extremely lacking in know- ledge about it. The Internet is not a giant commercial undertaking with gobs of government support, either, like certain other _proposed_ networks and network technologies. However, it has done things right, from the start or through informed experimentation. The results are truly astounding. I can't say the same about the United Kingdom way of doing things, and this silly both-ways addressing problem is but one of the buggy things that proves that it's begging for a cleanup. I think I could do it for as little as a hundred million pound sterling, and less operating costs after cutover. Give me three years, and you'll have Internet all over the United Kingdom. Any takers? :-) -- [Erik Naggum] <erik@naggum.uu.no> +47-256-7822
pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk (Piercarlo Grandi) (07/28/90)
"enag" == Erik Naggum writes: enag> Originator: enag@slembe.ifi.uio.no enag> In article <PCG.90Jul22172454@thor.cs.aber.ac.uk>, enag> pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk (Piercarlo Grandi) writes: pcg> The fact that in the Internet the top level domain country code is GB pcg> for the United Kingdom enag> It's also my understanding that it was the then administrators of enag> NRS or whatever who decided to implement their own hack with enag> respect to domain names, and ignore ISO 3166. Which they are perfectly entitled to, because Janet and the NRS are totally independent of the DNS and Internet. The use of ISO 3166 is an Internet convention; other networks can use other conventions. pcg> When I see discussions by people quoting RFCs and wishing that pcg> everybody conform to them, e.g. register in the DNS, etc..., they seem pcg> to constantly forget that the Internet is *one* net, even if the pcg> largest. enag> If you want to talk to or with the Internet, follow Internet rules. enag> It's as simple as that. Say that to the X.400 people. They sure will listen. :-) :-). enag> If you continue to insist that you should be allowed to follow enag> whatever rules you fancy on the Internet, you will have to be enag> taken off the net, either by force from the Internet side, or by enag> default, since you won't be reachable. That's not the problem, the problem is whether the Internet has ways to address of issue of communicating with networks that do not follow Internet rules. As far as I am aware, the % hack is the only half baked way, and all its critics clamor instead for its removal and everybody registering with the DNS, and having MXs point at the relevant gateways. This is clearly *impossible*. It will never happen, not even within the USA. It is not even desirable. But a lot of people in this newgroup forget about that, as I have already remarked. They complain about Janet/NRS names not complying to RFC syntax. Well, precisely -- they have nothing to do with Internet syntax, they belong to a different world, like the UUCP ones (to which exactly the same ideas apply). This is forgotten by all the Internetcentrics that for example think that everything that has dots in it must be an Internet name, and would therefore do rabid name resolution based on that delusion. The % hack is not an hack to do source routing; it is a way to say @ in a non Internet sense within an Internet address. If we had a network out there where the dot had a special meaning, we would need a dot synonym as well probably. Should a gateway rewrite any addresses in NRS format to DNS format? even if in signatures? Even if they make no sense in the DNS? I think not, IMNHO, because in general it is not *possible*, because ther emay be no equivalent. Even in the easiear cases, it may be better not to provide translations between two different naming syntaxes/conventions. Suppose that I send a message to the Internet from Janet; I should address it (and I do) as enag%slembe.ifi.uio.no@uk.ac.nsfnet-relay because I must address the gateway using NRS conventions (and this explains what is at the right of the @), and I cannot use the DNS address the target while using the @ contained in it because that has meaning for the NRS. Almost by chance the Janet-Internet gateway uses the percent hack to resolve the overloading of @, but it could decide to accept e.g. '#' as a synonym for the DNS @, or provide some form of quoting (which would be best, or my idea to use a Then-To: header for gateway use). When I get a reply from the Internet, it might/should be addressed as (assuming that the Internet side of the gateway uses % as a synonym for @ as well): pcg%uk.ac.aber.cs@nsfnet-rely.Janet.net pcg%uk.ac.aber.cs@nsfnet-rely.NRS.org pcg%uk.ac.aber.cs@nsfnet-rely.ac.gb (which one do you think would be most appropriate, incidentally?) but not as pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk which is not a legal Internet address (ironically it may be currently valid though, because of the double registration of Janet names in the NRS and the DNS, if I remember correctly). Of course there is no reason to assume that I need type all this myself; the MTA could apply heuristics (which break down in the CS case for example, but that is not a problem with naming schemes, only with the heuristics) and detect when the supplied address is outside the locally valid naming zone and generate the reference to the appropriate gateway in the apporpriate form, e.g. using tables, as we seem condemned to do, both Janet and Internet, when addressing somebody in the X.400 world. pcg> If the people on the Internet harbor the delusion that everybody pcg> must respect the relevant RFCs, or else, they will lose pcg> connectivity with not just the UUCP world, but also the UK, BITNET, pcg> and many others. [ ... avoiding ... ] enag> This is largely achieved by having gateways that accept and follow the enag> rules of both the networks they're on. You seem to think that the enag> Internet should accept all sorts of standards, and have failed to enag> grasp the idea of a gateway. This is not the Internet's fault, enag> either. I think you have failed to understand the context of this discussion at all, which was why the % hack is necessary. Let me repeat here in yet another form: it is necessary to hide @'s that have meaning in non Internet naming zone addresses from over eager Internet resolvers, and thus avoid breakdowns in the heuristics used to convert addresses between two different conventions. Were it true that gateways were properly designed! And were it true that gateways *could* be properly designed, that they could convert all addresses meaningfully. On a fairly different subject: enag> This doesn't scan well. Are you saying that many sites are migrating enag> as quickly away from ISO/GOSIP networks as they can? Oh yes. enag> I wasn't aware of any ISO/GOSIP networks that any site could enag> migrate away from to begin with, Well, in continental Europe the *only* WANs available are ISO oriented (and eventually GOSIP oriented). What is happening that the level of service is crude enough and expensive enough that many sites are running a largish segment of the Internet in Europe using these WANs as transport, with TCP/IP tunnelling on X.25 (or ISDN when available, or even on point-to-point lines, even switched ones, where not available). Norway is different because it was on the ARPAnet since SATNET days. enag> and it seems to me that this ISO/GOSIP stuff is being migrated enag> _to_ by people who want to win contracts with the GOSIP folks. That is something that is happening with the *government*. Where people have to pay with their own funds, the move away from ISO and to TCP/IP is obvious to the naked eye. In Europe it is slowest in the UK, where Janet is (nearly) 100% government subsidized, and for some EEC projects, where the same idea applies. enag> I know I would be very happy to be wrong, but the trade rags haven't enag> made me feel that way for a long time. No, no. You can be happy, try to figure out the number of names in the Internet that have a .de .dk .nl .fr .se .fi top domain and their increase in the last few years. De facto, the Internet is today the dominant international WAN in continental Europe, at least as far as the research community is concerned. enag> Give me three years, and you'll have Internet enag> all over the United Kingdom. Any takers? :-) If only... I think it could be done in three months. I reckon virtually all Janet sites actually run Internet protocols locally, and by buying off-the-shelf switching equipment and reusing the current lines a switch to TCP/IP interconnection among them could be done fairly quickly. -- Piercarlo "Peter" Grandi | ARPA: pcg%cs.aber.ac.uk@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk Dept of CS, UCW Aberystwyth | UUCP: ...!mcsun!ukc!aber-cs!pcg Penglais, Aberystwyth SY23 3BZ, UK | INET: pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk
perand@admin.kth.se (Per Andersson) (07/29/90)
In article <PCG.90Jul28175500@odin.cs.aber.ac.uk> pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk (Piercarlo Grandi) writes:
[ many things ]
To stop english mail-users to try stopping Csechoslovakia from using the
ISO language code, and to make clear that JANET is a separate net which
doesn't want to be on the Internet, why not establish yet another pseudo-
domain ? Let them be known as foo@bar.baz.janet or something. It is their
users and their gateways that needs to be told things, and is't certainly
not Csechoslovakias fault that the UK domain scheme is backwards. It can't
be that hard for the gateways to turn the adresses around.
Per
--
---
Per Andersson
Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden
perand@admin.kth.se, @nada.kth.se brian@ucsd.Edu (Brian Kantor) (07/29/90)
Seems to me a straightforward solution to the ambiguity of UK addresses is for the uk nameservers to simply map the entire uk string as subdomains in a global .gb domain. For example, uk.ac.man.cs would become ac.man.cs.gb uk.co.wombat co.wombat.gb which unambiguously lets the UK keep their addressing system AND share in the global DNS. Did I miss something? Or is this too obvious? - Brian
ronald@robobar.co.uk (Ronald S H Khoo) (07/29/90)
perand@admin.kth.se (Per Andersson) writes: > Let them be known as foo@bar.baz.janet or something. I hope I'm right in reading sarcasm into this statement. I thought we got away from network based addresses LONG time ago. Besides, you're mixing up two separate issues there: The political issue: the .UK registry (known as the NRS) registers names the wrong way round in their forms. I'm under .UK so I'm OFFICIALLY registered as UK.CO.ROBOBAR (yes, in capitals :-) but I'm not on JANET [though to be mailable from JANET, I must register an APPLICATION-RELAY who _is_ on JANET to send me my mail -- its like an MX -- that seems reasonable to me]. The technical issue: the coloured book transport mechanisms officially used on JANET uses reversed names. That's TRANSPORT. UUCP transport is far worse, and yet it is possible to Get Things Nearly Right with UUCP. It's also politically necessary for some Universities to have to provide a user interface that accepts these backwards addresses, this is ALSO not a real problem (see below). The current situation is in fact only minimally sub-optimal. NRS addresses ARE valid Internet addresses -- The Internet domains under .UK belong to the NRS, that is all. And yes, Piercarlo, they _are_ Internet domains. OK, so 99.9 % of the domains under .UK are just MX'd behind either the nsf.ac.uk or mcsun.eu.net (like me) but that's neither here nor there. Lots of North American domains are similarly MX'd behind uunet.uu.net, et. al. What's the difference ? > and is't certainly > not Csechoslovakias fault that the UK domain scheme is backwards. It can't > be that hard for the gateways to turn the adresses around. Simple. The NRS scheme requires that ALL addressable hosts are registered in the database. The correct solution is to try the reversed addressed address for an EXACT match in the NRS database, and if it isn't there, then it isn't a valid NRS address, SO USE IT THE RIGHT WAY ROUND. Some JANET-type oughta write up an RFC for this sorta thing :-) The heuristics are similar to those you need for matching incomplete local addresses. After all, a hypothetical jerry@complex.math.foo.edu who wanted to mail freddy@gizmo.cs.foo.edu might quite reasonably say that "mail freddy@gizmo.cs" should work as he expects, and only if gizmo.cs.foo.edu doesn't exist does he expect the mailer to look in Czechoslovakia. Whether it does or not should be a LOCAL policy issue and not impinge on the Internet at large. I would personally prefer not to have lost the ability to mail the REAL gizmo.CS and REQUIRE FQDNs even internally ("so set up a mail alias" would be what I'd say) but that's a *LOCAL* policy issue. Which way round you start off with depends on your political needs. Some UK Universities are quite powerful enough not to need to bother, so some of their user interfaces provide support for correctly ordered addresses. More cautious places may need to leave their general mail services the wrong way round, but that's a *LOCAL* problem. All you need to do is treat JANET as a local net with a strange internal interface. That's all. Internally, JANET sites have a simple technical solution, which only requires that they specify which way round any particular user interface is configured. If they ALL just specified them the right way round, there's nothing their political masters could do about it. "I'm sorry sir, the sendmail.cf's come from the USA configured like this and we don't have a mail guru who can fix it. We have been asking for this extra sysadmin post for a while but budget restrictions have frozen recruitment this year." The kludge of trying to accept addresses either way round globally is just a bad kludge. But it did mean that no decisions needed to be made, I guess. Now the kludge is starting to get strained, perhaps someone will have to do something. I must admit I'm glad it's not me. -- Eunet: Ronald.Khoo@robobar.Co.Uk Phone: +44 81 991 1142 Fax: +44 81 998 8343 Paper: Robobar Ltd. 22 Wadsworth Road, Perivale, Middx., UB6 7JD ENGLAND.
enag@ifi.uio.no (Erik Naggum) (07/30/90)
The saga continues... In article <1990Jul29.235750.20841@kth.se>, Per Andersson suggests: >> Let them be known as foo@bar.baz.janet or something. In article <1990Jul29.103214.14864@robobar.co.uk>, Ronald S H Khoo replies: > I hope I'm right in reading sarcasm into this statement. I thought we got > away from network based addresses LONG time ago. Well, not yet. Remember BITNET. UUCP is still out there. It could be a good solution to introduce JANET as a fake-domain until you guys clean up your act and get it right. > Besides, you're mixing up two separate issues there: Excuse me, but I think you're the one who's mixing up things around here. Your particular problem is that you have nonfunctional gateway software, and you pretend to make this a problem at the other side of the gateway. Since I'm at the other side, and care about doing things right at this side, I get pissed each time some UK idea comes up to "adapt" the world to their silly ways. > The technical issue: the coloured book transport mechanisms officially > used on JANET uses reversed names. That's TRANSPORT. UUCP transport is > far worse, and yet it is possible to Get Things Nearly Right with UUCP. Wrong. Domain names are properly referred to as _session_ mechanisms, if you want to use that contrived ISO model. I don't know the details about your colored books, and I don't want to, but I suspect that at the transport layer, you talk about some X.121 address or at least something to stuff into the address block of the call request packet of your very advanced X.25 network. Likewise, we don't use domain names at the TCP-level, we translate the domain name into a 32-bit IP-address before TCP gets involved. Domain names inhabit the app- lication layers in the Internet protocol suite. There is nothing wrong about using domain names at the application layer that translate to UUCP node names somewhere at the transport layer, further enhanced by fancy telephone numbers. People do that all the time. There is even a draft out which considers ISDN addresses for Internet transport services (TP/IX). The problem with this insipid reversed name style is that it is up to the applications to do it right, and it wouldn't have been a problem if you UK types could get sufficiently intelligent designers from abroad to write your software. Of course, since you're backwards, and your users won't exactly understand that all by themselves, they will use Internet domain names for addressing purposes. So, you can choose between a major operation to educate the users to understand that UK is one way, the rest of the world is the other way, or a major oper- ation to get this silly JANET convention killed and safely buried. Nobody will mourn its passing. > The current situation is in fact only minimally sub-optimal. NRS > addresses ARE valid Internet addresses -- The Internet domains under > .UK belong to the NRS, that is all. And yes, Piercarlo, they _are_ > Internet domains. Ah, I'm sorry to reveal a maximally sub-optimal and important distinction between NRS names and Internet domain names (not _addresses_, damn it!). You've probably heard it before, so it shouldn't be new to you: NRS names are _reversed_ relative to the order used by the DNS. Novel, eh? > OK, so 99.9 % of the domains under .UK are just MX'd behind either the > nsf.ac.uk or mcsun.eu.net (like me) but that's neither here nor there. > Lots of North American domains are similarly MX'd behind uunet.uu.net, > et. al. What's the difference ? The difference is: <suspenseful pause> They're REVERSED! God, this is getting to be really funny. > Simple. The NRS scheme requires that ALL addressable hosts are > registered in the database. The correct solution is to try the reversed > addressed address for an EXACT match in the NRS database, and if it > isn't there, then it isn't a valid NRS address, SO USE IT THE RIGHT WAY > ROUND. Some JANET-type oughta write up an RFC for this sorta thing :-) I hope no JANET-type will ever attempt such a horrible thing. This is a JANET-local problem, and should properly concern not a single person off your particular island. There is no guarantee that FOOBAR.CS (Internet) and FOOBAR.CS (JANET) will not exist at the same time. The correct way to do it is not to ask the Internet first, either, but to drop the JANET convention, or to successfully hide it from the rest of the world. The latter is a truly major undertaking (as witness the current discussion), while the former is routine in comparison. > The heuristics are similar to those you need for matching incomplete > local addresses. After all, a hypothetical jerry@complex.math.foo.edu > who wanted to mail freddy@gizmo.cs.foo.edu might quite reasonably say > that "mail freddy@gizmo.cs" should work as he expects, and only if > gizmo.cs.foo.edu doesn't exist does he expect the mailer to look in > Czechoslovakia. The Internet decided to deprecate this practice about two years ago. It is no longer relevant, precisely because of the problems that arise from its usage. The Host Requirements RFC mandates use of Fully Qual- ified Domain Names in all instances. This does not require heuristics or randomly-lose options, only simple algorithms. > Whether it does or not should be a LOCAL policy issue and not impinge on > the Internet at large. I would personally prefer not to have lost the > ability to mail the REAL gizmo.CS and REQUIRE FQDNs even internally > ("so set up a mail alias" would be what I'd say) but that's a *LOCAL* > policy issue. Wrong. It ceases to be a local policy issue the day some unsuspecting individual discloses his address to another user. This is also why that silly JANET convention has become a global problem: Some unsus- pecting users will give out their JANET-version address to some other unsuspecting users, and interoperability suffers, at the cost of frustrated users and postmasters wasting their time at both ends. The rules for when it would be appropriate to use a local, abbreviated domain name are very complex. It's not a string comparison, to put it that way. > The kludge of trying to accept addresses either way round globally > is just a bad kludge. But it did mean that no decisions needed to be > made, I guess. Now the kludge is starting to get strained, perhaps > someone will have to do something. I must admit I'm glad it's not me. Someone, that is, from United Kingdom. The problem is that all too many of your countrymen are so fucking glad it's not them that it's never going to happen. And the really sad thing is that this stupidity is wasting time all over the place. Users can't get mail to work properly, signatures, letter heads and business cards advertise inappropriate addresses, postmasters get bugged by their users, people think that electronic mail in general doesn't work, manual authors devote a whole chapter to perverted addressing forms, lots of network people waste their time trying to cope with the problem, and hundreds of articles are written to denounce the silly Brits, and some silly Brits making a successful attempt to prove that there is no hope to get them to understand and change their ways. The person responsible for this idiotic decision should be flogged. Sometimes I think we would do lots of people a favor by _sinking_ the entire island. I mean, taking out a five mile thick horizontal slab of land below sea-level and move it somewhere it could earn a more useful keep than it does today. This would give real substance to the Atlantis myth, excepting of course that Atlantis was supposed to be a nice place with streets of gold. That will have to remain a myth. I have a map of Europe on my wall that has a nice blue color off the northwest coast of France. Beautiful. -- [Erik Naggum] Gaustadalleen 21 +47-256-7822 <erik@naggum.uu.no> N-0371 OSLO; NORWAY +47-260-4427 (fax)
davecb@yunexus.YorkU.CA (David Collier-Brown) (07/30/90)
ronald@robobar.co.uk (Ronald S H Khoo) writes: >The kludge of trying to accept addresses either way round globally >is just a bad kludge. But it did mean that no decisions needed to be >made, I guess. Now the kludge is starting to get strained, perhaps >someone will have to do something. I must admit I'm glad it's not me. I should note that one of the causes of this situation is the non-uniqueness of the syntax: both overload the characters "." and "@" for similar purposes, but use them in a different namespace. We've become all too used to distinguishing namespaces by their syntax (":" and "!"-based, notably) and tend to be sucessfully misled... Compare this to the problem of structures in typed programming languages: struct fixed_dns_like_t { char *host, *subdomain, *domain, *toplevelDomain; } Murrican; struct fixed_janet_like_t { char *toplevelDomain; *domain, *subdomain, *host; } UKnian; If I saw the above in a "C" program, I'd wonder about 1) the programmer's sense of humor, and 2) the compiler that managed to disambiguate it, and 3) portability to the usual compilers elsewhere. Then I'd start wondering about funding a rewrite (:-)) Seriously, though, the heuristic that allows the two forms to coexist needs to be **very** widely promulgated, and the cross-registration that allows it be mandated for a fixed period, during which no-one in the internet would be allowed to register uk.ac.*.cs On second thought, add a (:-)) to that too: I can't quite take it seriously! --dave -- David Collier-Brown, | davecb@Nexus.YorkU.CA, ...!yunexus!davecb or 72 Abitibi Ave., | {toronto area...}lethe!dave Willowdale, Ontario, | "And the next 8 man-months came up like CANADA. 416-223-8968 | thunder across the bay" --david kipling
Dan@dna.lth.se (Dan Oscarsson) (07/30/90)
In article <ENAG.90Jul29224449@slembe.ifi.uio.no> enag@ifi.uio.no (Erik Naggum) writes: >The saga continues... > >The problem with this insipid reversed name style is that it is up to >the applications to do it right, and it wouldn't have been a problem >if you UK types could get sufficiently intelligent designers from >abroad to write your software. Of course, since you're backwards, and >your users won't exactly understand that all by themselves, they will >use Internet domain names for addressing purposes. So, you can choose >between a major operation to educate the users to understand that UK >is one way, the rest of the world is the other way, or a major oper- >ation to get this silly JANET convention killed and safely buried. >Nobody will mourn its passing. Somebody will! Why is janets convension backward???? I think the Internet one is backward!!! It feels more right to do it the Janet way. Everything that the USA does is not good, just look at what they have done with character sets. > >> The heuristics are similar to those you need for matching incomplete >> local addresses. After all, a hypothetical jerry@complex.math.foo.edu >> who wanted to mail freddy@gizmo.cs.foo.edu might quite reasonably say >> that "mail freddy@gizmo.cs" should work as he expects, and only if >> gizmo.cs.foo.edu doesn't exist does he expect the mailer to look in >> Czechoslovakia. > >The Internet decided to deprecate this practice about two years ago. Did they? But it is much nicer to do it with incomplete local adresses. Instead only two character top domains should be allowed (that is remove edu, com etc.) and no two character subdomains. Dan -- Dan Oscarsson Department of Computer Science Lund Institute of Technology e-mail: Dan@dna.lth.se Box 118 S-221 00 Lund, Sweden
sow@cad.luth.se (Sven-Ove Westberg) (07/30/90)
In article <1990Jul30.095853.21359@lth.se> Dan@dna.lth.se (Dan Oscarsson) writes: | |Why is janets convension backward???? I think the Internet one is |backward!!! It feels more right to do it the Janet way. | Hmm... Backwards or not why did you write your own address, "Computer Science, Lund Institute of Technology, Sweden" ???? |Everything that the USA does is not good, just look at what they |have done with character sets. But US creates working code that they distibute free!!! We in Europe is experts in large never ending investigations. If we don't have an valid ISO standard, sit on our ass and wait for it. And when some kind of mail standard comes (X.400) it did not support local charactersets in the address field GREAT. Sven-Ove Westberg, CAD, University of Lulea, S-951 87 Lulea, Sweden. Internet: sow@cad.luth.se
rick@UUNET.UU.NET (Rick Adams) (07/30/90)
UUNET is the forwarder for the .CL (Chile) domain. About a year ago we added the following line to our sendmail.cf R$+<@uk.$+.cl> $#error$:No such host This keeps misdirected Janet mail from being sent over the expensive link to Chile. Whoever is forwarding for .CS will undoubtably have to do the same. ---rick
jpp@specialix.co.uk (John Pettitt) (07/30/90)
Arrrrrgggggghhhhh ! Firstly the UK is not == to JANET ! There is life outside JANET and most (if not all) if the commercial sites in the UK have correct domain ordering (foo.bar.co.uk) both internally and externaly. All of the gateways available to commercial sites work the right way round (hi peter) so where is the problem ? Answer: rutherford 1/2 :-) I don't see that in the real world there is a problem the gateway should (and as far as I can see does) convert (well ukc does anyway). Can anyone sight an example of mail the was correctly addressed with a FQDN in the right order for the local mailer ending up in the wrong place due to a domain order problem with the UK ? BTW if you think the UK domain order is bad try X.400, HDB uucp won't pass X.400 addressed mail because of the `/' in the addresses. -- John Pettitt, Specialix International, Email: jpp@specialix.com Tel +44 (0) 9323 54254 Fax +44 (0) 9323 52781 Disclaimer: Me, say that ? Never, it's a forged posting !
perand@admin.kth.se (Per Andersson) (07/31/90)
In article <1990Jul29.103214.14864@robobar.co.uk> ronald@robobar.co.uk (Ronald S H Khoo) writes: >> I wrote : Let them be known as foo@bar.baz.janet or something. >I hope I'm right in reading sarcasm into this statement. I thought we got >away from network based addresses LONG time ago. Hmm. There is some sarcasm, yes. The obvious Internet way is to name it .gb of course. And as said, there is .UUCP and .BITNET for others who can't/won't conform to Internet naming. So whats another one ? That makes it foo@bar.baz.gb, the ISO-3166 way. And if, as announced, the commercial sites got their domains the Internet way, the probably can be reaonably snappy in changing top level domain. So when are we ready with the MX-records ? Any year now. Per -- --- Per Andersson Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden perand@admin.kth.se, @nada.kth.se
Dan@dna.lth.se (Dan Oscarsson) (07/31/90)
In article <1551@ulmo1.mt.luth.se> sow@cad.luth.se (Sven-Ove Westberg) writes: >In article <1990Jul30.095853.21359@lth.se> Dan@dna.lth.se (Dan Oscarsson) writes: >| >|Why is janets convension backward???? I think the Internet one is >|backward!!! It feels more right to do it the Janet way. >| > >Hmm... Backwards or not why did you write your own address, >"Computer Science, Lund Institute of Technology, Sweden" ???? > Because thats the standard for writing an adress on paper mail, not because it looks best that way. I feel it is right to use sow@cad.luth.se if you see the domain adress as an adress seen from the local domain, then you could write a mail to user@xxx.luth.se by only using user@xxx. On the other hand, it you see an adress from the global view which means that you always must use full domain adress, sow@se.luth.cad is more right as this is the way (from left to right) from the global view to the local place cad. Dan -- Dan Oscarsson Department of Computer Science Lund Institute of Technology e-mail: Dan@dna.lth.se Box 118 S-221 00 Lund, Sweden
sterba@margaux.inria.fr (Milan Sterba) (07/31/90)
Czechoslovakia has joined the world network community early in 1990.
There are by now about 10 uucp sites, located mostly on universities
in both Bohemia and Slovakia. Czechoslovakia is member of EUnet and
of EARN and is sure to seek for better european and world connectivity
soon.
The top level domain .CS has not been registered at the NIC yet, but
that will be done in a *VERY* near future. The addresses with .CS are
already used internally in Czechoslovakia.
The Czechoslovac uucp bacbone is situated in Bratislava (Pressburg)
and is controlled by Peter Pronay and Gejza Buechler (peter@iaccs.uucp
and gejza@iaccs.uucp)
I am posting it here to stress that .CS is really becomming a great
problem which calls for a fast solution.
Milan Sterba
-------------------------------------------------------------------
sterba@inria.fr sterba@vse.uucp
tel : (331) 39 63 55 75 (422) 21 25 703
INRIA Rocquencourt Prague School of Economics
Domaine de Voluceau nam. A. Zapotockeho 4
B.P. 105 13iacovou@cs.umn.edu (Danny Iacovou) (08/01/90)
i am having a hard time trying to see what the problem is with the .CS domain? as i see it the united stated is *flooded* with 'cs machines', we were just told that Czechoslavakia only has 10 UUCP sites. isn't is easier for Csechoslavakia to be issued something like .CZ, .CV, or something? i am very unclear on this point. -- neophytos iacovou university of minnesota email: iacovou@cs.umn.edu computer science department
del@thrush.mlb.semi.harris.com (Don Lewis) (08/01/90)
In article <1990Jul31.085417.5582@lth.se> Dan@dna.lth.se (Dan Oscarsson) writes: >On the other hand, >it you see an adress from the global view which means that you always >must use full domain adress, sow@se.luth.cad is more right as this is the >way (from left to right) from the global view to the local place cad. Then shouldn't it be se.luth.cad!sow? -- Don "Truck" Lewis Harris Semiconductor Internet: del@mlb.semi.harris.com PO Box 883 MS 62A-028 Phone: (407) 729-5205 Melbourne, FL 32901
thinman@cup.portal.com (Lance C Norskog) (08/02/90)
If CS is the domain for Czeckoslovakia, what happens if the Czecks and Slovaks decide to split up? This domain name was picked quite naively.
postel@VENERA.ISI.EDU (08/03/90)
Right. Since the country codes in DNS are defined to be those from the list of two-letter codes in ISO-3166, this proves what we've always thought: the ISO is "quite naive". --jon. From namedroppers-RELAY@NIC.DDN.MIL Thu Aug 2 04:14:38 1990 Date: 2 Aug 90 05:10:51 GMT From: portal!cup.portal.com!thinman@apple.com (Lance C Norskog) Subject: Re: CS top-level domain and its impact on the UK? Sender: namedroppers-relay@nic.ddn.mil To: namedroppers@nic.ddn.mil If CS is the domain for Czeckoslovakia, what happens if the Czecks and Slovaks decide to split up? This domain name was picked quite naively.
enag@ifi.uio.no (Erik Naggum) (08/03/90)
In article <1532@seti.inria.fr> sterba@margaux.inria.fr (Milan Sterba) writes:
I am posting it here to stress that .CS is really becomming a great
problem which calls for a fast solution.
.CS is _not_ becoming a great problem. Not even a problem. The use
of localized domain names instead of FQDN's is a great problem. The
UK reversed names (local to the joint academic networks?) is a very
great problem.
.CS is welcome at this end, and I would like the JANET reversal to
become history as soon as possible.
--
[Erik Naggum] Gaustadalleen 21 +47-256-7822
<erik@naggum.uu.no> N-0371 OSLO; NORWAY +47-260-4427 (fax)towfiq@interlan.Interlan.COM (Mark Towfigh) (08/03/90)
In article <1990Aug1.005118.6153@cs.umn.edu> iacovou@cs.umn.edu (Danny Iacovou) writes: i am having a hard time trying to see what the problem is with the .CS domain? as i see it the united stated is *flooded* with 'cs machines', we were just told that Czechoslavakia only has 10 UUCP sites. isn't is easier for Csechoslavakia to be issued something like .CZ, .CV, or something? i am very unclear on this point. There is NO PROBLEM between the US machines with CS in their domain name and Czechoslovakia's new top-level name. The problem is with incorrectly-implemented gatewaying between the JANET network and the Internet (fully described by Eric Naggum in another posting). -- Mark Towfigh, Racal InterLan, Inc. towfiq@interlan.Interlan.COM W: (508) 263-9929 H: (617) 488-2818 uunet!interlan!towfiq "The Earth is but One Country, and Mankind its Citizens" -- Baha'u'llah
thorinn@DIKU.DK (Lars Henrik Mathiesen) (08/06/90)
From: pcg@odin.UUCP (Piercarlo Grandi) You oughtn't put non-qualified local host names in the Path: line of articles; the mailing list gateways use them for From: lines. Now, odin is not a registered UUCP host, but thor (which fouled me up when I last replied to you) is registered as the name of a host in Milford, Ohio, U.S.A.. Also, if a site has a local host with the same name, some IDA sendmail configurations will append the local domain when receiving such mail. [ This has been a brief excursion into matters of UUCP naming. ] When I get a reply from the Internet, it might/should be addressed as (assuming that the Internet side of the gateway uses % as a synonym for @ as well): pcg%uk.ac.aber.cs@nsfnet-rely.Janet.net pcg%uk.ac.aber.cs@nsfnet-rely.NRS.org pcg%uk.ac.aber.cs@nsfnet-rely.ac.gb That would be the most correct way of handling things. A pity that nsfnet-relay does not choose to be known under any such name in the DNS: neither janet.edu, nrs.org or gb exist. I assume that you were joking? (which one do you think would be most appropriate, incidentally?) but not as pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk which is not a legal Internet address (ironically it may be currently valid though, because of the double registration of Janet names in the NRS and the DNS, if I remember correctly). Since the only way to get from Internet to Janet seems to be through nsfnet-relay, and its only DNS name seems to be nsfnet-relay.ac.uk, which is not a legal Internet host name either, we might as well use the %-free form until such time as the Janet might decide to have their gateways follow Internet rules on the Internet side. -- Lars Mathiesen, DIKU, U of Copenhagen, Denmark [uunet!]mcsun!diku!thorinn Institute of Datalogy -- we're scientists, not engineers. thorinn@diku.dk
brian@ucsd.Edu (Brian Kantor) (08/06/90)
Not to beat a dead horse, but if you take a JANET mailbox address like john-thomas@uk.ac.manchester.cs and tack a .GB on the end of it, thus john-thomas@uk.ac.manchester.cs.gb and you have a pair of nameservers for '.gb' that understand that subdomains of '.gb' are JANET-compliant hostnames that have to be treated according to coloured-book rules, then you have something that the JANET/internet gateways can handle unambiguously, and that is completely acceptable to the internet DNS - and won't be confused with something that originates anywhere else, or that belongs elsewhere in Europe. The simple trick here is that the GB nameserver can just strip off the .GB and ask the JANET nameserver, which is presumably separate anyway. Simple, straightforward, and elegant in its simplicity. Therefore, it will never happen. - Brian
bob@MorningStar.Com (Bob Sutterfield) (08/06/90)
In article <9008052136.AA05067@skinfaxe.diku.dk> thorinn@DIKU.DK (Lars Henrik Mathiesen) writes:
From: pcg@odin.UUCP (Piercarlo Grandi)
You oughtn't put non-qualified local host names in the Path: line
of articles; the mailing list gateways use them for From: lines.
You're right, he oughtn't, but not for that reason. RFC1036
disparages the use of "Path:" contents for mailer replies, which is
what "From:" is for. Any news-to-mail gateway that constructs a mail
"From:" line from information contained in a a news "Path:" line is a
bug - it should use the provided "From:" line. Similarly, any news
user agent that constructs a mail reply's "To:" line based on a news
"Path:" line is broken. Essentially, "Path:" contains no information
of use to a mailer, and mailers are best advised to ignore it.
For other less-rabid opinions, there's quite a hot discussion on just
this point, currently raging along in news.software.b or news.admin or
some more appropriate place.
The reason he shouldn't put non-qualified, non-pathalias-registered
host names in Path: is because the news flooding algorithm will cause
neighbors to fail to pass the article to the machine that's already
registered in the UUCP/Pathalias maps as using that name on its Path:
lines.
[ This has been a brief excursion into matters of UUCP naming. ]
We now return you to your regularly-scheduled domain discussion...enag@ifi.uio.no (Erik Naggum) (08/07/90)
In article <9008052136.AA05067@skinfaxe.diku.dk> thorinn@DIKU.DK (Lars Henrik Mathiesen) writes: > Since the only way to get from Internet to Janet seems to be through > nsfnet-relay, and its only DNS name seems to be nsfnet-relay.ac.uk, > which is not a legal Internet host name either, we might as well use ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ > the %-free form until such time as the Janet might decide to have > their gateways follow Internet rules on the Internet side. I have complained loudly about things in the UK, but I don't think we should bash them for things which are not errors. As far as I can tell, "nsfnet-relay.ac.uk" is a perfectly valid and legal Internet host name. Can you explain what makes you think it is _not_ legal? -- [Erik Naggum]
dfk@eu.net (Daniel Karrenberg) (08/07/90)
thorinn@DIKU.DK (Lars Henrik Mathiesen) writes: >Since the only way to get from Internet to Janet seems to be through ^^^^ >nsfnet-relay, and its only DNS name seems to be nsfnet-relay.ac.uk, >which is not a legal Internet host name either, we might as well use >the %-free form until such time as the Janet might decide to have >their gateways follow Internet rules on the Internet side. ^^^^^^^^ You contradict yourself. Assuming that there is only one route is almost always wrong and *always* shortsighted. In this case it is both. Your's respectfully Daniel -- Daniel Karrenberg Future Net: <dfk@cwi.nl> CWI, Amsterdam Oldie Net: mcsun!dfk The Netherlands Because It's There Net: DFK@MCVAX
towfiq@interlan.Interlan.COM (Mark Towfigh) (08/07/90)
In article <ENAG.90Aug6201933@svarte.ifi.uio.no> enag@ifi.uio.no (Erik Naggum) writes: I have complained loudly about things in the UK, but I don't think we should bash them for things which are not errors. As far as I can tell, "nsfnet-relay.ac.uk" is a perfectly valid and legal Internet host name. Can you explain what makes you think it is _not_ legal? "UK" is not a valid top-level domain -- the correct one is "GB". -- Mark Towfigh, Racal InterLan, Inc. towfiq@interlan.Interlan.COM W: (508) 263-9929 H: (617) 488-2818 uunet!interlan!towfiq "The Earth is but One Country, and Mankind its Citizens" -- Baha'u'llah
P.Kirstein@CS.UCL.AC.UK (08/08/90)
There is a long-standing debate between Jon Postel and the British about the use of GB versus UK as a top-level Domain Name. The British chose UK before the name GB had been standardised. For the past year, the British have tried to get both GB and UK registered concurrently. For various technical-political reasons, there has been a lenthy debate on the conditions under which both can be registered - which has so far not led to agreement. This is not the place to go into the disagreements between the British and the Internet authorities. Nevertheless, this is one of the areas in which the British are trying to conform - and it is not just bloody-mindedness or ignorance that has .GB not a top-level domain.
postel@VENERA.ISI.EDU (08/08/90)
Hi. I agree with Peter Kirstein that there is a difficult debate about how to transition the British from UK to GB. I disagree that at the time the DNS was started that "The British chose UK before the name GB had been standardised.". This is total bunk. There was some debate at the time that the proper choice was GB not UK, and the ISO-3166 standard was in place at the time. At that time, the Internet authorities (being such nice folks) gave in and let the Brits have it their way. The current mess may be a lesson about following the rules vs doing what is convenient. --jon.
jpp@specialix.co.uk (John Pettitt) (08/08/90)
postel@VENERA.ISI.EDU writes: >Hi. I agree with Peter Kirstein that there is a difficult debate about how >to transition the British from UK to GB. >There was some debate at the time that the proper choice was GB not UK, >and the ISO-3166 standard was in place at the time. At that time, the >Internet authorities (being such nice folks) gave in and let the Brits >have it their way. >The current mess may be a lesson about following the rules vs doing what >is convenient. It's all very well for people in the US to talk about this issue but it's much more complex than it appears. I know that the ISO standard says GB but the accepted political meaning of GB is England Wales and Scotland. UK on the other hand includes Northern Ireland. This has the makings of a fine political row, I can just see the headline: "Americans exclude Northern Ireland from computer network" You get the picture ? Anyway what is all this standards BS from a country the still uses gallons and can't even get the size of them right :-) :-) :-) :-) -- John Pettitt, Specialix International, Email: jpp@specialix.com Tel +44 (0) 9323 54254 Fax +44 (0) 9323 52781 Disclaimer: Me, say that ? Never, it's a forged posting !
P.Kirstein@CS.UCL.AC.UK (08/09/90)
I was trying to give a diplomatic answer, with some simplifications. As I understand it, and I do not guarantee the facts since the people who know them here are on vacation, the facts are similar to those I gave - but Jon is also right. The ISO 3166 standard was in place, but X.400 was not, when the name of UK was chosen. It was not clear to the Joint Network Team (JNT) what name would be chosen for their mail, since they cover Northern Ireland - for which the official name is the United Kingdom - while Great Britain (GB) excludes Northern Ireland. For this reason they chose UK. Some time later (or so I have been told!), X.400 chose its addressing conventions, and the official British representatives (and this was at a political level much above the JNT) agreed that ISO 3166 applied to X.400 mail. By then there was substantial usage of "UK" in the Internet, and the changing from UK to GB might also be considered to have political connotations. It is the clearing up of this mess which is the subject of the current discussions. My intervention was merely to make others aware that this was not a case of the British "not caring as usual"; both Jon and we are well aware of the problem, and the difficulties it is causing all of us. It is just the mechanisms and timing of changes which are not agreed yet.
P.Kirstein@CS.UCL.AC.UK (08/09/90)
The statement you make that "UK" is not a VALID Internet top-level domain is not true. It is true that "GB" is the official country code for British X.400 mail. It is also true that ".GB" would be a DESIRABLE high top level domain name for the United Kingdom to use for Internet mail. However most organisations in the US do not use ".US" as part of their address, and at present all JANET and MOD sites use ".UK". The top level domain names they use are VALID; they just do not follow a desirable convention. They are valid names as long as they have been properly registered with the NIC according to agreed Internet procedures. As I have described before, it is the conditions under which ".GB" can be registered - relative to the existing ".UK" - which is the subject of discussions between UK authorities and the NIC/Postel.
huitema@jerry.inria.fr (Christian Huitema) (08/09/90)
I was amazed by the whole debate. It started from one simple constatation, i.e. that the introduction of a ".cs" country code would break the heuristics which currently allow a Janet user to send a mail to either "user@edu.foo.bar.cs" or "user@cs.bar.foo.edu". Obviously, one does not need much thinking to discover that one only needs to list all the ".cs" subdomain in the gateway to fix the heuristics; has there are probably a dozen such domains, this is no big deal. And, no, this is not a prerequisite to connecting Czechoslovakia. But then, one see a number of people discovering that the Brits live in an island, that they drive on the wrong side of the road, that their screw are screwed in the wrong way, that they have all sorts of exotic metrics (like, how many grains do you count in a stone?), and that their universities are registered under ".ac.uk" rather than ".gb" (why not ".en" + ".we" + ".sc" + ".ni", by the way?). The funny thing is that they believe that there is nothing wrong with that, that driving on the left side is not any more dangerous than driving on the right side of the road; they probably start eating their eggs the wrong way too... At a time when all cities of all industrial countries look more and more alike, we should be glad of their efforts to maintain some diversity! Still, one may observe that allowing both "user@edu.foo.bar.cs" and "user@cs.bar.foo.edu" is akin to driving both on the left side and on the right side simultaneously. No doubt that the heuristic will be stressed again and again... Christian Huitema