WorldNIC
James Rishaw
jamie at dilbert.ais.net
Wed Jun 10 19:05:25 UTC 1998
Eric Germann wrote:
> At 09:53 AM 6/10/98 -0700, Michael Dillon wrote:
> >The MITRE Corporation registered mitre.org in 1985 and the Aerospace
> >Corporation registered aero.org in 1987. This idea that .ORG was only for
> >non-profit organizations is an example of historical revisionism
> >propogated by people who were not there at the time the TLDs were created.
>
> Well, if one draws ones references from "DNS and BIND" (First Edition) by
> Albitz and Liu, which is widely accepted as a definitive resource on DNS,
> on page 21, the refer to .org as "Non-commercial organizations, like the
> Electronic Frontier Foundation (eff.org)". This is further propogated in
> the Second Edition on page 18.
>
> RFC 1591 which defines it as a miscellaneous TLD came along two years later.
>
> RFC 920 (1984) defines it for domains that don't fall under the .COM, .NET,
> .GOV, etc, singling out commercial entities for .COM exclusively. That
> kinda leaves .org for noncommercials by inference.
Well, yes, but RFC1366 also says hosts with >32 subnets and 4096 hosts
qualify for a Class B. :)
When I want to go back and look at "what used to be" (the good old days)
I grab my red book. I got it from SRI.. they published it in 1992.
They list:
COM
This is the domain for commercial businesses and organizations that make a
profit through a service or sale a product[sic]. This is the largest
top-level domain.
EDU
This domain is for degree-granting educational institutions, such as colleges;
universities; community colleges; libraries; research institutes;
astronomical observatories; (blah blah).
GOV
This domain is for non-military national government organizations, e.g.
Veterans Administration, Department of Energy, national laboaratories such
as Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. State governments also fit under
this domain at the second-level, e.g. CA.GOV or HAWAII.GOV. State agencies
should be registered at the third level, e.g. WATER-DEPARTMENT.CA.GOV[...]
MIL
This is the domain for U.S. military organizations. [...]
NET
This is the domain for backbone systems - NICs, NOCs, gateways, etc. Only
machines necessary for the actual operation of the network can be registered
within this domain.
ORG
This is the domain for not-for-profit organizations. Any profit-making
organization does not belong in this domain. It is also for technical-
support groups; professional societies and associations; and computer
users' groups. ORG also exists as a parent to subdomains that do not
clearly fall under the other top-level domains.
US
The US domain is a top-level domain created for people in the US who have
computers at home, or small local corporations who wanted to register their
hosts geographically.
> Then again, there used to be a requirement to have OPERATIONAL name servers
> when registering a domain, but that seems to have gotten historically
> revised away also when $$$ entered the picture. But I digress...
Yeah. I actually talked with someone this AM about that. I think I'm
going to walk the DNS again to look for lame servers. I'll post a summary
here whenever I get around to doing it. :)
-jamie
/12-line sigfile deleted
--
jamie rishaw (dal/efnet:gavroche) American Information Systems, Inc.
rdm: "Religion is obsolete." gsr: "By what?" jgr: "Solaris." (1996)
Tel:312.425.7140, FAX:312.425.7240
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