The point is that people will continue to use their SunOS 3.5, Xenix286, and BellTechnologies Unix, IDRIS, or whatever archane old Unix flavor they have and if it has a resolver at all it won't know the first thing about hashing anything. Those folks that can't recompile their applications can type cisco.ci.com, and do their part to add a level of hierarchy, but they aren't going to be happy computing a hash function and typing that in as a DNS name.
I believe that Paul's suggestion was that this level of hashing or the additional heirarchy be hidden within the root name servers. I.e., a request to ns.internic.net for cisco.com would get translated within their named to cisco.ci.com and sent off to ns-ci-com.whoever, who would then pass the info back as "cisco.com" to avoid confusing anyone. Such a change is easy (*cough*) to impliment in a limited fashion on a few root servers, as long as what gets back to the end users is still "cisco.com", which this idea would do. It just puts a transparent additional level of heirarchy in, hidden behind the root servers. -george george william herbert gherbert@crl.com KD6WUQ Unix / Internet Consultant http://www.crl.com/~gherbert