From: woods@robohack.UUCP (Greg A. Woods)
Subject: Re: Q: organizational subdomains?
Organization: Elegant Communications Inc.
Distribution: can
Date: Sun, 10 Jan 93 16:47:17 GMT

In article <1993Jan9.221647.12953@tdkcs.waterloo.on.ca> timk@tdkcs.waterloo.on.ca (Tim Kuehn) writes:
> Mostly because that's the only standard way of getting a standard 
> naming convention across all possible sites in Canada. If one goes 
> by functional naming schemes, then there is *no* way you can generate 
> a standard naming scheme which 1) is simple, and 2) covers all 
> possibilities. 

I'm not so certain a "standard naming convention" is necessary once
the top-level domains have been decided upon (unless, of course, the
top-level essentially describes one, or one group of, organization(s),
such as ".EDU" or ".CA.GOV", where organisational policy would/could
dictate the subdomain naming conventions.

It is most certainly not desireable, IMHO, to have a subdomain naming
convention in Canada which is different from that on the rest of the
Internet.  (Which in itself is in somewhat of a confusing state!)

> If one assumes a naming resolution mechanism for names between 
> different entities in the same geographical area (Acme Skates 
> vs Acme Computers) geographical naming is easier to generate 
> names for, and to remember. Want to send mail to the local Acme
> computer office? Send mail to acme.waterloo.on.ca. Looking for 
> their provincial office? Then it's acme.on.ca. National head 
> office? Call acme.ca!

Good bloody luck!  :-)

Who's going to maintain this nightmare?

Such an orthoganal naming convention seems to be exactly what domain
names attempt to avoid.  Though I'm not (yet) an expert on DNS MTA's,
I don't know of many existing ones which can successfully do such
generalised searches as are necessary to make this work, since with
DNS alone it will not work.

> >In <1ids10INNpk0@grolsch.cs.ubc.ca> demco@cs.ubc.ca (John Demco) writes:
> >> - Functional subdomains don't seem particularly useful to the user.
> >
> >In article <1993Jan7.070250.9631@robohack.UUCP> woods@robohack.UUCP writes:
> >That all depends on the user.  So far as I can tell, it's a simple
> >matter of perception.  Since regardless of the loss of relationship to
> >some arbitrary physical location, functional names no more abstract
> >than geo/political names.  We're still in the infancy of this
> >cyberspace, and I think a clear direction now may prevent years of
> >future confusion.
> 
> Granted, which is why it's so critical to establish a rational 
> standard *now*, before we're saddled with an unweildy system 
> which has to be scrapped later on with great pain and duress 
> because it just didn't work.

I was attempting to imply that the existing definition of top-level
domain names had already established a direction, and that we should
take serious consideration of the fact that what some folks might be
attempting to do in CA-DOM might be in conflict, thus creating and
maintaining a state of confusion for end users of electronic mail.

> As far as geographical domains being worse than functional names, 
> there's no reason if a person or company moves to amend their current
> registration and MX information, change their old MX record to point 
> to their new domain location, and some time later (4-6 months) delete
> the old MX/domain information as being out-of-date.

I guess one of the benefits of e-mail that I've always been desirous
of is it's ability to maintain an ethereal identity which is
independent of one's physical time-space locality.  In other words,
once I'd established a cyberspace identity, I'd never have to change
it again!

> How are you going to 
> admin something based on functionality? How much would you like to bet 
> on two competing companies agreeing to allow a competitor to maintain
> *their* MX and forwarding information? I doubt it'd happen, particularly
> in the case of arch-rival companies.

Easy -- subdomain names are given out on a first-come-first-served
basis, admined by you're local service provider and arbitrated by
whoever/whatever the NIC becomes.

Normal trademark law will take care of the name disputes were someone
tries to "steal" someone elses name.

> What about uucp sites that use address munging to fake it? There
> isn't necessarily a DNS  active, nor do is there really a need to 
> have UUNET or some other service provider "register" these sites.

If a given UUCP site wishes to have mail deliverable via a DNS name,
then, yes, they'll have to have a registered name.  As for the
un-official ".UUCP", I'm happy to continue to have un-official
gateways provide service to UUCP-net folks (like me!).

> >Easy for .COM -- split it by service providor.  
> 
> Or by geographical area? .ca.com?

I was talking about a virtual split, *not* a split visible by naming
convention!  I dislike ".CA.COM" just as much as I dislike ".COM.CA"!

> Are you arguing against functional domain names? This is the point I've 
> been trying to make all along -- if people want to have a functional naming
> system then they should use domain spaces which already lend themselves
> nicely to exactly that instead of taking an already-geographic naming
> scheme and mix it up with functional-naming conventions.

I'm most definitely against functional naming *within* a geo/political
top-level domain 

> If suitable top-level functional subdomains already exist, then why 
> functionalize an already geographically-based .ca? That way leads to 
> duplication of services (and problems!) with a system that is already 
> running elsewhere.

Exactly.  I couldn't have said it better myself.

> Also, you may be able to one day mail "postmaster@on.ca" as more 
> local-area service providers appear. Also, having an agreed-on 
> subdomain scheme makes the next step (creating a directory service) 
> that much easier since the namespace that has to be searched for a 
> given person is that much smaller.

The point is that you cannot now expect e-mail to work for any given
"subdomain" (i.e. any syntactically legal sub-element of the RHS of a
FQDN), and given some of the proposed subdomain naming conventions
I've seen here, it will never be possible, at least not without paying
someone a whole lot of bucks to maintain it all.

> Knowing that person's under a registered subdomain at least narrows 
> the search down to a more reasonable scope as opposed to the current 
> situation.

Yes, if they're under a "registered subdomain", but not if you only
know they are within an "un-registered subdomain" such as ".on.ca".
Who or what is going to query all the authoratative MTA's in a give
set of subdomain's to find the desired mailbox?  If you cannot 

Complex subdomain naming conventions, IMHO, only hinder the process.
As I said before, we should be devoting our energy to working on the
various directory services (other than X.500 :-) that I see slowly
cropping up.

> However, I do not think such things are germain to can.domain, 
> and further discussion should be forwarded to some other group.

Well, it all depends on what you want to do with/about CA-DOM.....
-- 
						Greg A. Woods

woods@robohack.UUCP, woods@Elegant.COM  VE3TCP	UniForum Canada & ECI
+1 416 443-1734 [home] +1 416 362-XRSA [work]	Toronto, Ontario; CANADA
Newsgroups: can.domain