In message <20110620190517.2242.qmail@joyce.lan>, "John Levine" writes:
Simple hostnames as, global identifiers, were supposed to cease to work in 1984.
Can you point out where that is stated?
jaap
RFC 897.
I see where it says that all of the hosts that existed in 1984 were supposed to change their names to something with at least two components, as part of the transition to the DNS. I think we can assume that process is now complete.
I don't see where it says that new DNS names can't have a single component. A page and line reference would be helpful.
Heirachical names have 2 or more labels or else they become simple names (one label). They are dis-joint sets. Then you hace RFC 1123 which explictly acknowledges the use of unqualified names. Simple names are indistingishable from unqualified names and unqualified names need to be qualified and the only syntaxically valid way to do that is to add a label. Although RFC-822 allows the local use of abbreviated domain names within a domain, the application of RFC-822 in Internet mail does not allow this. The intent is that an Internet host must not send an SMTP message header containing an abbreviated domain name in an address field. This allows the address fields of the header to be passed without alteration across the Internet, as required in Section 5.2.6. Then you have SUBMISSION, RFC 4409 section 4.2., Ensure All Domains Are Fully-Qualified. This allows simple names on input and says to qualify them. Or do you want more examples of where the use of simple names as global identifiers will cause things to break. Allowing or using address and MX records at the apex of a TLD is stupid, reckless behaviour. Configuring a TLD to behave as if it is a simple host names is stupid, reckless behaviour, i.e. be careful about which SRV records you add. Some are used with host names equivalents as suffixes and some arn't. Mark -- Mark Andrews, ISC 1 Seymour St., Dundas Valley, NSW 2117, Australia PHONE: +61 2 9871 4742 INTERNET: marka@isc.org