From: bryan@notorious.rs.itd.umich.edu (Bryan Beecher)
Newsgroups: mi.misc,mi.news
Subject: Re: MI.ORG
Date: 25 Jan 1993 17:13:20 GMT
Organization: University of Michigan
Distribution: mi
NNTP-Posting-Host: notorious.rs.itd.umich.edu
Originator: bryan@notorious.rs.itd.umich.edu

In article <1993Jan24.193507.24344@rotag.mi.org> kevin@rotag.mi.org (Kevin Darcy
) writes:
>
>1)  The names are too long, and give folks bogus impressions when they get
>    out of date, e.g. if my address is kevin@rotag.ann-arbor.mi.us (blech!),
>    and I move to Royal Oak, or wherever, net.people will still ASSUME I'm in
>    Ann Arbor, unless or until a change is made in the nameservice. I'm
>    not a fan of propagating bogus information, even if it's relatively
>    innocuous bogus information. The world is already a pretty complex place
>    without adding to the "information clutter" problem.

The names are definitely longer.  No doubt about that.

Is the "bogus information" problem really an issue?  When one moves, there's
a lot of places where your new address has to get recorded.  This seems to
add one more.  Worrying about net.people making assumptions about the city
you live in hardly seems to be a show-stopper.

>2)  Mi.us doesn't have local control over nameservice. The administrators in
>    CA, from all reports, seem to be doing a good job now, but who's to say
>    that couldn't change in an instant, with a flurry of bureaucratic org-chart

>    and/or budget-priority changes?
>
>
>2a) The .us folks seem to have a STRONG bias against wildcard MX'es. Even
>    stronger, if that's possible, than mi.org's traditional bias. Without
>    local control, what's to stop them outlawing wildcard MX's completely,
>    thus depriving non-IP-connected sites of a valuable mail routing tool?

Why is local control any better than ISI control?  Most of this stuff gets
done via e-mail.  And since I said I could act as a front-end, I could also
take phone calls, and send mail on people's behalf.  I think the U-M Info
Tech Div is a lot more liable to go through any changes (read the papers)
than ISI.

>3)  What about bona fide "org"s, i.e. non-profits? They don't really belong in
>    mi.us, do they? And according to the RFC's I've seen, you're not really
>    supposed to register a second-level domain if you have less than 50 nodes
>    in it. Mi.org has almost 50 nodes, but a small non-profit with, say, half
>    a dozen nodes, would clearly be in violation of that guideline if they
>    tried to register a second-level .org domain. Lots of folks ignore those
>    guidelines, true, but again, why contribute to the problem?
>
>3a) Where is the fine line drawn between individuals and non-profits, anyway?
>    We have pretty much jettisoned the 501(c)(3) yardstick, right, so if I
>    were to, for example, open up my whopping three-node bedroom network to
>    select friends and relatives, as a kind of informal, non-profit "club",
>    should I be in .org or .us? Mi.org covers both usage classes right now.

This is not a problem.  There are A LOT of places without 50 hosts that have
a domain.  People who want their own domain should continue to register them
in US or ORG or wherever they want it.

>4)  It's not broken, and transition would be a minor pain in the ass.

MI.ORG is not broken, true.  Moving towards a standard namespace and removing
the reliance upon the kindness of strangers is a good thing, IMHO.  There's no
reason not to begin a move soon, keeping MI.ORG around for, say, a year so
no one loses any mail.

>If I didn't have a financial matter pending resolution for the next few
>months, I'd get my home network IP-connected right now and run the silly
>nameservice myself, if no-one else wanted to...

Let me repeat that running the MI.ORG domain is not a problem for me or U-M,
and that I have no plans to just shut things off or anything insane like that.
My interest is looking at this situation pro-actively, so that the system that
is left in place can continue into the future indefinitely.
-- 
Bryan Beecher, U-M Information Technology Division (+1 313 747 4050)
Domain:	Bryan.Beecher@umich.edu      Path:  ..!uunet!destroyer!bryan
Newsgroups: mi.misc,mi.news