Were A record domain names ever limited to 23 characters?
bmanning at vacation.karoshi.com
bmanning at vacation.karoshi.com
Tue Oct 11 00:50:44 UTC 2011
back in the day,
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz1234567890ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ.ca.us.
existed to test the length of DNS label. circa 1992
^b.com also existed (yes, we considered ^p)
the heady days of DNS evolution!
/bill
On Fri, Oct 07, 2011 at 06:16:46PM -0700, Owen DeLong wrote:
> NSI was never the only registrar. They were just the only registrar
> for COM, ORG, NET, EDU, and possibly a few other TLDs, but,
> they were, for example, never the registrar for US or many other
> CCTLDs.
>
> Therefore, it was not internet wide, though I will admit that it did
> cover most of the widely known gTLDs.
>
> Owen
>
> On Oct 7, 2011, at 4:45 PM, steve pirk [egrep] wrote:
>
> > It turns out it was an artificial limitation on Network Solution's part.
> > Being the only registrar at the time, it was pretty much internet wide at
> > that point, contrary to the RFC spec.
> >
> > What was so funny was that someone got Internic/Network Solutions to up the
> > limit. Apparently just to save some money on reprinting movie posters... ok,
> > so they would have had to change some trailers...
> > ;-]
> >
> > On Fri, Oct 7, 2011 at 16:39, Jimmy Hess <mysidia at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >> On Fri, Sep 30, 2011 at 10:32 PM, Joe Hamelin <joe at nethead.com> wrote:
> >>> I remember tales from when there was an eight character limit. But that
> >> was
> >>> back when you didn't have to pay for them and they assigned you a class-c
> >>> block automatically. Of course it took six weeks to register because
> >> there
> >>> was only one person running the registry.
> >>
> >> You may be referring to a limitation of a certain OS regarding a
> >> hostname; or some network's policy.
> >> But the DNS protocol itself never had a limit of 8 characters.
> >> When we are talking about the contents of "A" record names,
> >>
> >> I would refer you to
> >> http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2181.txt
> >> "RFC 2181
> >> Clarifications to the DNS Specification R. Elz, R. Bush
> >> [ July 1997 ] (TXT = 36989) (Updates RFC1034, RFC1035, RFC1123)
> >> (Updated-By RFC4035, RFC2535, RFC4343, RFC4033, RFC4034, RFC5452)
> >> (Status: PROPOSED STANDARD) (Stream: IETF, Area: int, WG: dnsind) "
> >>
> >> "
> >> Elz & Bush Standards Track [Page 12]
> >> ...
> >> Occasionally it is assumed that the Domain Name System serves only
> >> the purpose of mapping Internet host names to data, and mapping
> >> Internet addresses to host names. This is not correct, the DNS is a
> >> general (if somewhat limited) hierarchical database, and can store
> >> almost any kind of data, for almost any purpose.
> >> ...
> >> 11. Name syntax
> >> "
> >> The length of any one label is limited to between 1 and 63 octets. A
> >> full domain
> >> name is limited to 255 octets (including the separators). The zero
> >> length full name is defined as representing the root of the DNS tree,
> >> and is typically written and displayed as ".". Those restrictions
> >> aside, any binary string whatever can be used as the label of any
> >> resource record.
> >> "
> >>
> >> --
> >> -JH
> >>
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > steve pirk
> > refiamerica.org
> > "father... the sleeper has awakened..." paul atreides - dune
> > kexp.org member august '09
>
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