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
> 






More information about the NANOG mailing list