looking for terminology recommendations concerning non-rooted FQDNs

Sat Feb 23 04:01:03 UTC 2013

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Cutler James R" <james.cutler at consultant.com>

> A domain name without a terminal dot is a relative domain name.
> -- An application requesting name to address translation gets to
> decide if a search list is to be used, including the default of dot.
> 
> A domain name with a terminal dot is a Fully Qualified Domain Name.
> -- An application requesting name to address translation must submit
> the name as received to the lookup process.
> 
> These definitions have been effective of decades and do not need
> additional terminology.
> -- Faulty implementations are not an excuse for ever more complex
> terminology.

The authoritative document here is, as Joe Abley noted earlier, RFC 1035,
which says, in section 5.1:

"""
Domain names that end in a dot are called absolute, and are taken as 
complete.  Domain names which do not end in a dot are called relative; 
the actual domain name is the concatenation of the relative part with 
an origin specified in a $ORIGIN, $INCLUDE, or as an argument to the
master file loading routine.  A relative name is an error when no
origin is available.
"""

Or, in more Jewish terms: not so much.

And in fact, I don't believe that you *have* a manual API-level choice
as an application as to whether your resolver library will apply a
search list or not: if you specify an absolute name, it won't; if you 
specify a relative name, it will.

Nope: gethostbyname(3) only takes one argument: char *hostname

So the only control you have as app is whether you include the trailing
dot.

(PS: your quoting (or bulleting) protocol is non-standard and non-intuitive)

Cheers,
-- jra

-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                  Baylink                       jra at baylink.com
Designer                     The Things I Think                       RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates     http://baylink.pitas.com         2000 Land Rover DII
St Petersburg FL USA               #natog                      +1 727 647 1274