🚀 go-pugleaf

Sean Doran <smd@uunet.ca> writes:
> ...
>With regard to the issue of whether individuals should be registered
>in the CA-DOM namespace, I have one principal thought: it's a bad idea.
> ...
>IMNSHO, individuals should be left to the left of the @ in an e-mail
>address.  Regrettably, there are plenty of camels' noses poking into
>various tents, as there are a fair number of domains which are clearly
>for the use of some well-known individual.
>
>Mostly these have been registered as organizations rather than as
>individuals, as almost all of them have users other than the one for
>whom the domain was allocated.
>
>However, it is hard to escape the thought that a domain named after
>oneself is a bit of an ego thing, despite the real fact that some of
>the "personal" domains out there are owned by real, official (if a bit
>ad hoc) holding-companies.

I think the situation remains that the individual is to the left of the
"@" sign and the machine is to the right; it has to work that way.  The
problem arises when a lot of people have personal machines for which
they want domain names.  In my own case the machine is called "herboid"
(which is a long story, and anyway I'm not the only user), and I'd
probably want "herboid.on.ca" if I registered (a municipality domain of
richmond_hill.on.ca would be a tad long, and last year it would have been
north_york.on.ca and if I wanted to be difficult I could make it
port_carling.on.ca on summer weekends).  However, what's to stop less
imaginitive people from naming their machines after themselves?  And what
makes that a bad name?  The question of collisions on common names used
as domain names boils down to the same thing as for "good" uucp
nodenames: most of them got taken early on.

>I think that in order to keep some sanity in the DNS it would be wise
>to consider either one or more parks for peronal names rather than one
>domain per person involved.  I would much rather see hohoho.org with a
>fair number of potential users than e.g. rudolf.north-pole.nt.ca,
>donner.north-pole.nt.ca and satan-claus.north-pole.nt.ca, each with
>one user and _maybe_ a guest or two.

As long as machines are being registered, you need "@something.domain",
with a different right side per machine.  You might be able to register
".personal.on.ca" and hand out subdomains under that more freely than
are obtainable directly under the province or the top level, but are
you gaining anything by that?  It's as long as a lot of municipality
domains would be.

If you want a lot of users at one virtual machine address, without all
the users registering their actual machines, you could offer a service
(and if I recall you may already have something like it) where somebody
can have an address something like joe_blow@mail.uunet.ca, which you'd
forward to joesbox!joe; he'd have to forge the From: header on his
outgoing mail to match, and then nobody but himeself and Uunet would need
to know that "joesbox" even exists.  That might be an important service
if domains ever become significantly harder to obtain.

(BTW, was "satan-claus" in your example a typo, or had you noticed too
that besides the similarity of name, both characters are portrayed
wearing red and black, with horned, cloven-footed servants, and are
reasons for being good rather than bad?)
-- 
Anthony DeBoer  < adb@herboid.uucp | uunet!geac!herboid!adb | adb@geac.com >