NAVYJOBS.COM

Mon Apr 22 13:22:21 UTC 1996

Well, that solution have a problem not present in vanilla
DNS -- nameservers no longer correspond to administrative
boundaries.

And it does not do anything to fix the name collision problem.

--vadim

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From: Sean Doran <smd at icp.net>
To: pferguso at cisco.com, smd at icp.net
Subject: Re: NAVYJOBS.COM
Cc: john at interport.net, nanog at merit.edu
Message-Id: <96Apr22.213840+0100_edt.20637+44 at chops.icp.net>
Date: 	Mon, 22 Apr 1996 21:38:31 +0100
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Status: R

| Personally, I like the <eighty-subdomains>.BigCompany.COM. approach;
| it just scales better. Less messy. Tastes great.

Me too.

However, there appears to be some counterpressure to move
towards what I perceive as some kind of system which lacks any real
hierarchy in the sense of domains.

Perhaps instead of trying to "fix" the DNS by creating
huge new bunches of things to the right of the last normally-seen
dot, we should move towards something completely different.

Maybe instead of:

	<whatever>.COM being considered as three
	tokens and being looked up as:

		ask a ROOT nameserver for COM NSes
		ask a COM nameserver for <whatever> NSes
		ask a <whatever> nameserver for appropriate info

		(all modulo caching)

	instead we treat it as (leaving out the '<' '>' stuff out of laziness):

		<w><h><a><t><e><v><e><r><.><c><o><m>

	and look up like this:

		ask a ROOT nameserver for M NSes
		ask a M nameserver for O NSes
		...
		ask a <w> nameserver for appropriate info

that will scale to a huge number of generally
unformatted labels for things.

This strikes me as a practical way of moving towards
".Earth" and ".Alt" and thousands of other "top-level-domains".

Other than technical scalability, the other general design goal 
for any changes to the status quo wouuld have to be
administrative scalability.

As a too-easy example, in this model that's essentially
making sure an overworked or evil delegator for $origin ever.com
won't break the ability of people wanting $origin whatever.com
or $origin never.com from going about obtaining those names.

Perhaps some form of automagic registration scheme should be
available to allow for others to initiate any rightwards
growth of names unless they involve certain charaters (like '.', perhaps,
so as not to overly confuse people who are used to foo.bar.com
being under the administration of whoever is in charge of bar.com).

Again, I worry about being wasteful of other people's time here;
this could be a non-issue for operators big and small for all I know,
so I'll drop back into read-only mode for a bit, and let smarter DNS
people and folks more in the trenches talk it out (or ignore it). 

	Sean.